Recently we reviewed one of the first ever PCIe Gen5 NVMEs from Crucial with their T700 series model. Crucial offers two versions of the same product, one with a pre-installed heatsink and one without, to fulfill all possible users' needs and scenarios. Today we will examine the non-heatsink version, with an updated firmware to see if we had any major performance differences and if copying from two two Gen5 drives will really boost your overall daily productivity. The Crucial T700 series boosts both reading/writing performance to the next level, managing to reach up to 12GB/sec reading performance. PCIe 5.0 is the latest iteration of the PCIe data transfer interface standard, which offers bandwidth capabilities of 32GT/s, compared to Gen4’s bandwidth limit of 16GT/s.

The new Crucial T700 series is built around the Micron 232-layer TLC NAND, which according to the official specs is nearly two times faster than the previous Gen4 performance SSD with sequential read speeds up to 12,400MB/s. The Crucial T700 Gen5 SSD is designed for Intel 13th Gen and AMD Ryzen 7000 series CPUs and PCIe 5.0 desktops and motherboards. The Crucial T700 SSD takes full advantage of Microsoft® DirectStorage and GPU decompression functionality to render high-resolution textures up to 60% faster, load assets in seconds, and achieve up to 90% less CPU utilization to free up the system for multitasking purposes.

Main features

• Sequential reads/writes up to 12,400/11,800MB/s
• Nearly 2x faster than our Gen4 SSD
• More than 22x faster than SATA
• Capacities of 1, 2 and 4TB for more games and UHD/8K+ videos
• Compatible with Intel® 13th Gen & AMD Ryzen™ 7000 series CPUs
• Backward compatibility in Gen3 and Gen4 systems
• Built with Micron® 232-layer TLC NAND2
• Reduce game texture load times with Microsoft® DirectStorage
• Hardware encryption for storage security with TCG Opal 2.01

- The Package/Overview

The Crucial T700 series can be found on Crucial's website, at various prices and capacities. The T700 version with a pre-installed heatsink has the CT1000T700SSD5 codename, while the barebone T700 is named CT1000T700SSD3. The retail box is kinda smaller than the heatsink version.

Inside the retail box, you won’t find much, just the NVME SSD drive and a quick printed guide. The product is inside a plastic shell that helps it survive transportation hazards.

It has all the typical dimensions for an M2 2280 NVME drive.

and at the back, you will find all the needed information as serial number and firmware revision.

The T700 series is based upon the Phison E6 controller which is an 8-channel design capable of running a bus speed of up to 2400 MT/s, Micron's 232-layer TLC NAND is present, and also as other reviewers have mentioned, the 2TB version packs 4GB of Micron's LPDDR4-4266, that should help with high read/write loads.

- Installation

Not much to be said here, just get the drive and plug it into an empty NVMe slot. In some boards you have to change Bios settings to Storage: PCIe to get the drive recognized. Before we start our tests, we can get some info for the drive via the Crucial Storage Executive software. In our system we had both Crucial T700 NVMEs installed, the barebone version came with preinstalled PACR5102 firmware revision, while the version with the heatsink showed a firmware upgrade as well.

Here is what the Crucial Storage Executive Software reported over the SMART information tab

Here is more information about the drive, it runs at PCIe Gen5

The CrystalDiskInfo software gives us more information about the drive, it runs at PCIe 5.0 x4 and supports NVME Express 2.0 protocol.