We may earn a commission when you buy through links in our articles. Learn more

Kingston Fury Renegade SSD review

The Kingston Fury Renegade SSD offers speedy storage speeds thanks to its PCIe 4.0 interface, and comes in sizes up to 2TB for just under £300.

The Kingston Fury Renegade SSD

Our Verdict

86%

Fast, well priced and equipped with a decent endurance rating, but you’ll want a heatsink for it.

With many PCIe 4 M.2 SSDs using the same flash memory and controller, it’s often down to each manufacturer’s firmware tweaks, pricing and durability to make their drives stand out. With a speedy Phison E18 controller under the hood, the Kingston Fury Renegade is certainly no slouch, and at less than £300 for 2TB and with a generous durability rating, it certainly seems to be competitively priced as well.

Our review sample is the 2TB model, which boasts a massive 2,000 terabytes written (TBW) endurance rating, but even the 1TB model offers 1,000 TBW, which is significantly more than the WD Black SN850, Samsung 980 Pro and other Phison-based SSDs such as the Corsair MP600 Pro. Only the slower WD Red SN700 offers more, and that’s designed for NAS boxes, so credit to Kingston for stumping up such a good durability rating backed up with a five year warranty.

Meanwhile, the Kingston’s Micron-made 3D triple-level cell (TLC) NAND flash memory can dish out a claimed read speed of 7,300MB/sec in sequential transfers, which is the same for all models, while Kingston claims the 2TB model can sequentially write at up to 7,000MB/sec, with this figure dropping to 6,000MB/sec and 3,900MB/sec for the 1TB and 500GB models respectively. Sadly, economies of scale don’t work here, as the 4TB model is no faster than the 2TB model, but it costs three times as much, so you’d have to really want 4TB on a single drive to consider it.

In terms of the module itself, the Kingston Fury Renegade doesn’t have a full heatsink, although it does have a sliver of graphene on top of the SSD to keep it cool while under load. However, the SSD still hit 71°C in the CrystalDiskMark benchmark in our back-to-back stress test, which occasionally saw speeds drop by several hundred megabytes a second.

Kingston Fury Renegade SSD

Fitting our test motherboard’s heatsink to the Kingston saw this peak temperature drop to 46°C with no further speed issues, but the extra cooling headroom failed to boost speeds any further.

In CrystalDiskMark, the Kingston’s sequential read and write speeds of 7,025MB/sec and 6,792MB/sec respectively are only a fraction slower without the heatsink, but both figures are some way below the claimed top speeds. Meanwhile, the Kingston hit 2,165 MB/sec in our 4K random 32-queue-depth read test with four threads, which was bettered only a little by the WD Black SN850, with other Phison E18 SSDs coming south of 2,000MB/sec. However, other Phison E18 drives closely match the Fury Renegade’s 1,794MB/sec write speed in this test.

AS SSD offered up read and write sequential speeds that were a little faster than the likes of the Corsair MP 600 Pro too, with the Kingston’s 5,510MB/sec read speed being around 200MB/sec quicker, although the 4K random read and write speeds were a bit faster on the Corsair SSD.

Conclusion

Based on its endurance rating alone, the Kingston Fury Renegade is a better bet than many Phison-based PCI-E 4 SSDs, especially as it has a decent warranty. However, you’ll need to ensure your motherboard has a heatsink for it (or buy one separately), as it can get toasty when running at full pelt.

This is why other SSDs may be a tad faster in some tests, as most similar models are equipped with much larger heatsinks. Thankfully, it’s also well priced for an SSD that offers a 6,800MB/sec write speed, and it’s the price that really makes this SSD so tempting, especially with its durability rating. If you want one of the fastest M.2 SSDs available for an affordable price, this is a great option.

Price
£299 inc VAT (2TB) £167 inc VAT (1TB) £109 inc VAT (500GB)

Scores
Performance: 48/50 | Features: 15/20 | Value: 23/30

The CustomPC Approved award

Pros

  • Good value
  • Excellent endurance rating
  • Fast performance

Cons

  • Can get toasty with no heatsink
  • Cheaper SSDs are nearly as fast
  • 4TB model is ridiculously expensive

Kingston Fury Renegade SSD specifications

  • Full capacity: 2TB
  • Formatted capacity: 1,810GB
  • Interface: PCIe 4
  • Heatsink: No
  • NAND: TLC
  • Controller: Phison E18
  • Endurance: 2,000 TBW
  • Warranty: Five years

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.