Samsung recently announced another proposal for PCIe 4.0 protocol, the new Samsung 990Pro series that supposed to further boost reading/writing performance, compared with the previous 980 / 980 Pro series. Today we will examine all three series back to back and present our findings and thoughts, if the new Samsung 990Pro series worth the extra cash and your attention...

Samsung 990 PRO PCIe 4.0 SSD Series features breakthrough innovations in proprietary NAND, controller, and software technology, the Samsung 990 PRO and 990 PRO with Heatsink are optimized for PC and console gamers, and creators seeking storage with outstanding performance, power efficiency, and thermal control.

The drives are well-suited for heavy gaming and productivity tasks like 3D rendering, 4K video editing, and data analysis. For a smooth and fast gaming experience, the 990 PRO Series delivers sequential read and write speeds of 7,450 megabytes per second (MB/s) and 6,900 MB/s respectively. The 990 PRO Series achieves random performance up to 1,550K IOPS, which reduces loading times dramatically. The 990 PRO Series is also optimized for Microsoft’s DirectStorage API software technology, which enables games to take advantage of fast NVMe SSDs.

Within the 990 PRO is the world’s first 8nm controller for consumer SSDs, which improves its power efficiency by up to 50% compared to the 980 PRO, increasing battery life on systems. Efficient thermal management provided by the nickel coating on the controller and a heat spreader label on the back side of the SSD means users needn’t worry about heat-related disconnections. Samsung’s Advanced Heat Dissipation Technology keeps the SSD at optimal temperature for hours of gameplay without performance degradation.

For an additional layer of thermal control, the Samsung 990 PRO with Heatsink meets the PCI-SIG D8 standards required for compatibility with desktops, gaming consoles, and laptops. Easily installed in minutes, console owners can more than triple their storage capacity for games and digital entertainment, eliminating frustrations from storage space limitations.

The 990 PRO with Heatsink has a futuristic design and RGB lights to fit the style of any gaming setup, and Samsung Magician Software allows users to customize the RGB lighting color and effects. This software also allows users to view critical device health information. The 990 PRO Series comes with an industry-leading 5-year limited warranty. A 4TB version of the 990 PRO Series will be available in 2023.

We bought the 990 Pro 1TB series (the version with the heatsink wasn't available by this time). The box design is slight different than the previous 980 / 980 Pro series.

Everything is well packaged and you won't find much inside, just a basic printed manual and the drive itself.

The product complies with the NVME 2.0 standard for M2280 dimensions

- Features Comparison

Below we gathered a comparison table according to what Samsung lists for both devices at their official website

As we can see the 980/980Pro and 990Pro have several differences either in specs and/or speed. The 990 Pro has the latest NVME 2.0 standard vs 1.3c of the 980Pro. There is also a different controller (Samsung vs Pablo vs Elpis for the 980Pro) and both 990Pro and 980Pro are armed with 1GB Low Power DDR4 SDRAM (1TB), which means it will be able to keep up with sustained reading/writing loads. According to the specs, the new 990 Pro series require less watt either in average/burst operation, compared with the 980 Pro series that probably will result in lower overall working temperatures under full load, we will see this later examined in our review.

All products have 5 years of warranty and 600 TBW warranty. Prices have dropped enough and you can find nowadays the lower end model 980 at 89 Euro, while the 980 Pro and 990 Pro are placed higher with a 32 euro difference, depending on your region and retail/online store. It's possible that prices will further get down as time passes.

- Installation

Not much to be said here, just get the drive and install it at an empty NVMe slot. In some boards you have to change Bios settings to Storage: PCIe in order to get the drive recognized. There isn't any Samsung NVME drive for the 980 Pro / 990Pro series so we used the stock Microsoft NVME driver with NTFS file system for all tested drives. The test PC system was based at AMD format, with a Ryzen 5 5600X, 32GB DDR4 RAM (G.Skill CL14) and an Asus ROG Strix X570-E Gaming Motherboard with the latest 4408 bios and AMD motherboard drivers/Windows 10 x64 drivers installed. No antivirus was running in the background and with the Samsung Magician we set the drive format at its best possible mode. Lastly, note that all drives were installed in PCI-e v4.0 slots with the stock motherboard NVME passive cooler. With such high performance drives, users should install anyway passive cooling to avoid thermal throttling...

After the initial format, you should expect to see around 931MB of free space for the 1TB variant.

The CrystalDiskInfo software gives us some details about the 990Pro 1TB model, it runs at PCIe 4.0 x4 and supports NVM Express 2.0 protocol with the Asus 570-E Gaming motherboard :

The Samsung Magician showed some information

, while both Samsung Magician and the 980 Pro and the 990 Pro series have their latest firmware installed:

We also set Performance Optimization to full performance mode to get the best possible performance.