Kingston Fury Renegade Heatsink 2TB review: now with cooling

The Kingston Fury Renegade SSD, tested last year was and still is one of the fastest models you can buy for an upgrade for PC storage or even a PlayStation 5 console. The 2TB capacity variant in particular pushed the limits of speed possible on an SSD, and now there’s a variant that promises even more performance. Because not all motherboards also include passive or active cooling for SSDs, Kingston has now released a self-cooled variant to ensure that high performance is sustained over time.

On the inside, the Kingston Fury Renegade is identical, but has been given new “clothes” on the outside

Basically, the new Kingston Fury Renegade SSD is, hardware-wise, identical to the one we tested last year. Instead, the new variant is equipped with a generously sized heatsink that covers both the top and bottom chips, making this a “dual sided” SSD. The heatsink is also removable, with obvious screws so it can be removed or replaced with another cooling solution, but if you’ve chosen the model with integrated cooling, you probably won’t want to do that. You can choose the original version in that case.

The SSD comes in a simple box, made mostly of cardboard, but it also includes a plastic sleeve to help protect the part in transit. Incidentally, apart from this wrapper, everything else seems to be recyclable. No other accessories or manuals are included. Being an SSD, they are not even necessary.

Test platform

For testing this SSD we used a system we have on test, equipped with Ryzen 7 7700X, one of the newest and most powerful processors of the moment, along with an AORUS ELITE AX X670 motherboard, 32GB Kingston Fury Renegade 32GB DDR5 RAM and a Radeon RX 6650 XT graphics card, which doesn’t help with storage, but completes the configuration as a gaming one.

The motherboard has an included heatsink, but we removed it to accommodate this SSD, and used exclusively a PCI-Express 4.0 x4 port for testing. The PCI-Express 5.0 slot was populated with a Crucial P3 Plus SSD, on which the operating system was installed. Using a PCI-E 5.0 slot would not have helped improve performance, as both slots were connected directly to the CPU.

Kingston Fury Renegade remains one of the best performing SSDs on the market

We ran the usual performance tests for SSDs and found that the results are almost identical between this model and last year’s. The Kingston Fury Renegade is still a top SSD, offering some of the highest transfer speeds on the market.

One test, however, caught my eye: the ATTO. It runs repeated tests, with files of various sizes, which puts pressure on the SSD for a long time. While in tests like CrystalDiskMark it’s easy to get high performance, as the test ends quickly and there’s not enough time to see if performance can be affected by temperature, in ATTO, you get a clear performance trend over time.

Benchmarks

CrystalDiskMark

• SEQ1M Q8T1 – Read: 7.362 MB/s / Write: 6.958 MB/s
• SEQ1M Q1T1 – Read: 4,120 MB/s / Write: 6,278 MB/s

AS SSD

• SEQ – Read: 6,250 MB/s / Write: 6,130 MB/s
• 4K-64Thrd: 3,798 MB/s / Write: 5,187 MB/s

ATTO

• Write: 6.45 GB/s
• Read: 6.86 GB/s

The SSD came very close to Kingston’s promised 7 GB/s speed, which is even exceeded in CrystalDiskMark, which reports 7.3 GB/s read and 7 GB/s write, but realistically it delivers about 6.5 GB write and about 6.85 GB/s read. And it pretty much stays there for the duration of the test, thanks to the extra cooling provided by the heatsink.

Kingston’s original Fury Renegade shipped without cooling applied, with an optional thin metal plate that helped but didn’t necessarily work wonders, as it only delayed speed limiting at low performance.

Since Sony recommends an SSD with heatsink attached for the PlayStation 5, the new Fury Renegade model can be inserted directly into a PlayStation console without further modification. You can refer to our guide on the installation process.

Conclusions

Whether you need a fast SSD for video games, video production, or a PlayStation 5 console, the Kingston Fury Renegade is one of the best performing on the market.