Our Verdict
85%
A good balance of price and performance, although it’s not much faster than PCI-E 3 drives.
Offering 2TB of speedy storage for under $250, and 1TB for under $120, the ADATA XPG GAMMIX S50 Lite is certainly an SSD that should be on your radar if you’re looking to jump on the PCI-E 4 bandwagon for as little money as possible. However, it doesn’t offer much of a performance benefit over the fastest PCI-E 3 SSDs, such as the WD SN750, which cost around the same amount of money.
It’s significantly cheaper than the latest PCI-E 4 SSDs, though, most of which retail for around $180 for a 1TB module, compared with just $119 here. That said, you’ll save even more cash if you’re happy to stick with a slower PCI-E 3 drive, as the WD Blue SN550 only costs $86 for a whole 1TB of storage.
The XPG GAMMIX S50 Lite has an impressive endurance rating of 740 terabytes written (TBW) and a five-year warranty, while it uses TLC memory and a Silicon Motion SM2267EN controller. It uses a cache to speed up write speeds, which sits at around 300GB in size on our 2TB sample. This drive has a formatted capacity of 1,860GB, and transferring more than that in one go will see the maximum write speed fall to below 1000MB/sec, although this is only going to be an issue for extremely large file transfers.
The S50 Lite also includes a thin heatsink, but it wasn’t heavy-duty enough to cope with our five-minute stress test, which saw the temperature top 75°C and the SSD throttling as a result, with the write speed falling to just 600MB/sec.
It’s clearly designed to sit under your motherboard’s own M.2 heatsink, though, and here, the sequential write speed sat at 3,183MB/sec, even after repeated benchmarks. Likewise, the sequential read speed in CrystalDiskMark sat at 3,858MB/sec, with temperatures staying below 60°C.
Interestingly, the XPG GAMMIX S50 Lite also produced a decent 4K random 32 queue-depth read speed of 1,842MB/sec, which is faster than many more expensive SSDs in CrystalDiskMark. That said, the write test here saw it fall off the pricier drives by over 300MB/sec. The S50 Lite was also much slower than the fast-paced competition in AS-SSD’s default 4K random read test.
Finally, software for this drive is freely downloadable and easy to use in terms of firmware updates, but it’s rather basic.
ADATA XPG GAMMIX S50 Lite pros and cons
Pros
- Good overall performance
- Better value than fastest PCI-E 4 SSDs
- Five-year warranty
Cons
- Latest SSDs have quicker sequential speeds
- Needs a third-party heatsink
- Not much faster than best PCI-E 3 SSDs
ADATA XPG GAMMIX S50 Lite specs
The ADATA XPG GAMMIX S50 Lite specs list is:
| Interface | PCI-E 4 |
| Max capacity | 2TB |
| Formatted capacity | 1.86GB |
| Controller | Silicon Motion SM2267EN |
| Endurance rating | 740TBW (2TB) |
| Warranty | Five years |
| NAND | TLC |
ADATA XPG GAMMIX S50 Lite price
The ADATA XPG GAMMIX S50 Lite is competitively priced, making it a sensible option for those seeking to maximize their bang for buck.
ADATA XPG GAMMIX S50 Lite review conclusion
As long as you use it with your motherboard’s M.2 heatsink, the ADATA XPG GAMMIX S50 Lite offers decent performance for its low asking price. It’s cheaper than many other PCI-E 4 SSDs, and while the faster drives outpace it in many synthetic tests, that difference isn’t always tangible in real-world use. Its write cache is large enough for it to shift a couple of hundred gigabytes around at full speed too, and it also has slightly better performance overall than the similarly-priced PCI-E 3 Samsung 980 SSD.
The only issues are that original PCI-E 4 SSDs based on Phison E16 controllers are still readily available and slightly faster, with many including large heatsinks for just $10-20 more. You can also get PCI-E 3 SSDs for a lot less money, although WD’s $85 SN550 does have significantly lower speeds overall.
Ultimately, the ADATA XPG GAMMIX S50 Lite strikes a good balance of performance and value. It’s cheaper than drives that offer higher speeds, but ultimately little real-world benefit, and it still offers a substantial boost over the likes of the WD SN550.
Looking for more storage upgrade options? Check out our guide to the best gaming SSD where we recommend options for every budget, with 1TB drives starting from just $55.