Yet another SSD leveraging the PCI Express 4.0 bus to deliver insanely fast read and write speeds has emerged. Called the Cardea Zero Z440, it's one of two new products by Team Group built specifically AMD's X570 platform, hoping to join the ranks of the Best NVMe SSDs.
The other is a new line of T-Force Dark Z α (Alpha) memory. Granted, RAM kits should work in any supported platform, but some modules are tested and validated for certain AMD and Intel builds.
In this case, Team Group says its T-Force Dark Z Alpha RAM is "tailor made" for AMD's latest Ryzen 3000 series processors and X570 motherboards. Based on Team Group's testing in such a platform, these are the timings the company advertises for the three speed tiers it offers:
- T-Force Dark Z Alpha DDR4-4000 RAM—CL18-22-22-42, $189 for 32GB, $99 for 16GB
- T-Force Dark Z Alpha DDR4-3600 RAM—CL18-22-22-42, $169 for 32GB, $89 for 16GB
- T-Force Dark Z Alpha DDR4-3200 RAM—CL16-18-18-38, $154 for 32GB, $79 for 16GB
These are available in 32GB (2x16GB) and 16GB (2x8GB) packages. MSRPs range from $79 for the least expensive kit to $189 for the most expensive one, as outlined above. It remains to be seen how street pricing will shake out (memory prices tend to fluctuate more so than other PC components).
That said, pricing at the top end is fairly aggressive. I took a peek on Newegg and 32GB kits of DDR4-4000 memory sell for around $312 on the low end, with several other kits priced north of $400.
As for the Cardea Zero Z440 SSD, Team Group is offering it in two capacities—2TB for $499 and 1TB for $249. Both capacities are rated to deliver up to 5,000MB/s of sequential read performance and up to 4,400MB/s of sequential write performance, along with up to 750,000 IOPS for random reads and writes.
You'll need an X570 motherboard to take full advantage of the Z440's speed capabilities, as that is the only consumer platform that supports PCIe 4.0. Otherwise, you won't see read and writes scale quite as high.
Team Group did not say when its new RAM and SSDs will be available to purchase.
