Kingston Fury Renegade G5 review: A top-shelf PCIe 5.0 SSD and then some

Best Prices Today: Kingston Renegade G5 NVMe SSD

I find Kingston to be an amazing company. Not only does it produce outstanding bargain hardware, it also vends products that soar to the top of the charts. One example of the latter is the Fury Renegade G5 NVMe SSD. It’s not cheap, but it’s not prohibitively expensive either. It also has the most generous TBW rating outside of Seagate’s pro SSDs.

Read on to learn more, then see our roundup of the best SSDs for comparison.

What are the Kingston Renegade G5’s features?

The Renegade G5 (will it escape from your system to go on the warpath? Hopefully not!) is a PCIe 5.0 x4, NVMe SSD featuring a Silicon Motion SM2508G controller and stacked, 218-layer BiCS8 TLC NAND.

It’s also a DRAM design with, according to the chip number (Micron D8CJG) in our 4TB review unit, 1GB of the precious primary cache for every terabyte of capacity.

If you haven’t read it elsewhere, DRAM as primary cache is far faster at random operations than host memory buffer (HMB) designs, though the latter are just as fast in most cases with large file transfers.

Kingston provides a five-year warranty on the Fury Renegade G5. This is “limited” by one of the most generous TBW (terabytes that may be written) ratings in the industry — one petabyte (1PB/1000TB) per 1TB of capacity. 600TBW is the industry average, though that seems to be creeping up with the BICS8 NAND. Go, Kingston, go!

Note that TBW only applies to writes and deletions, there’s no limit to reads, which check the voltage of cells rather than changing it.

How much is the Kingston Fury Renegade G5?

The Renegade G5 is currently available in 1TB/$165, 2TB/$240, and 4TB/$450 capacities, with an 8TB version slated to show up in November. Those prices are the “discounted” ones we found on Kingston’s Amazon store as of this writing.

The discounted prices are competitive with the like-performing PCIe 5.0/DRAM rivals listed in the performance charts, and considering the generous TBW ratings, a pretty good deal.

How fast is the Kingston Fury Renegade G5?

The Fury Renegade G5 came within a cat’s whisker of wresting the top spot on the PCIe 5.0 chart from the WD Black SN8100. It was only fastest in a couple of tests, but placed near the top in all the others.

The other drives: the aforementioned SN8100, Samsung’s 9100 Pro, and Crucial’s T710 all had their moments in the sun.

The G5 was excellent in CrystalDiskMark 8’s sequential throughput tests — as fast or faster than its rivals in three out of the four tests.

Queued random performance wasn’t bad, but not as strong as the Renegade G5’s sequential writing (or the other drives). The WD Black SN8100 stood out here as likely the best SSD to run an operating system on.

Bearing in mind, of course, that Windows doesn’t use multiple queues with NVMe as it should. A sad situation.

It was a couple of wins in the Explorer portion of the 48GB transfer testing that gave the Fury Renegade G5 a good result. However, it was not quite as fast in FastCopy as the others.

As to that, though the results may look to be erroneous, the difference in copy speed between Windows Explorer and FastCopy is absolute fact. FastCopy has what Explorer should have — code from this decade. Grab it for large data transfer operations. See my comparison of Windows Explorer, FastCopy, and Xcopy to learn more.

The Fury Renegade G5 was top dog (by that whisker) in the 450GB write test. Again, the difference between Windows Explorer and FastCopy is readily apparent: 3GBps as opposed to around 10GBps.

As to sustainable sequential writing, I wrote a 950GB VHD three straight times in Explorer with no break in between and only managed to slow the Renegade G5 from 2.85GBps to between 1.8GBps and 2GBps. I can live with that. So can the average videographer.

The Renegade G5 is basically as fast, or faster in most ways as the PCIe 5.0 DRAM competition. Of course, you need a still-not-ubiquitous PCIe 5.0 M.2 slot to take advantage. Or a free PCIe 5.0 slot and an adapter card such as the Asus Hyper M.2 x16 Gen5.

Should you buy the Kingston Fury Renegade G5?

Yes, you should buy it. The super-generous TBW rating breaks what is basically a performance tie in our books, even if the average user will never touch the limit of any of the drives. Still, it’s a winner from Kingston.

How we test

Drive tests currently utilize Windows 11 24H2, 64-bit running off of a PCIe 4.0 Samsung 990 Pro in an Asus Z890-Creator WiFi (PCIe 4.0/5.0) motherboard. The CPU is a Core Ultra i5 225 feeding/fed by two Crucial 64GB DDR5 4800MHz modules (128GB of memory total).

Both 20Gbps USB and Thunderbolt 5 are integrated and Intel CPU/GPU graphics are used. Internal PCIe 5.0 SSDs involved in testing are mounted in a Asus Hyper M.2 x16 Gen5 adapter card.

We run the CrystalDiskMark 8.04 (and 9), AS SSD 2, and ATTO 4 synthetic benchmarks (to keep article length down, we only report one) to find the storage device’s potential performance, then a series of 48GB and 450GB transfers tests using Windows Explorer drag and drop to show what users will see during routine copy operations, as well as the far faster FastCopy run as administrator to show what’s possible.

A 20GBps two-SSD RAID 0 array on the aforementioned Asus Hyper M.2 x16 Gen5 is used as the second drive in our transfer tests. Formerly the 48GB tests were done with a RAM disk.

Each test is performed on a NTFS-formatted and newly TRIM’d drive so the results are optimal. Note that in normal use, as a drive fills up, performance may decrease due to less NAND for secondary caching, as well as other factors. This issue has abated somewhat with the current crop of SSDs utilizing more mature controllers and far faster, late-generation NAND.

Note that our testing MO evolves and these results may not match those from previous articles. Only comparisons inside the article are 100% valid as those results are gathered using the current hardware and MO.

Best Prices Today: Kingston Renegade G5 NVMe SSD