HyperX Fury RGB SSD
Have we hit peak RGB?
RGB has become so omnipresent that it was only a matter of time before SSD manufacturers began producing RGB SSDs. Love RGB or loathe it, at the end of the day aesthetics are important to a lot of people. If there’s a demand, so shall it be. Why settle for a drab black or grey SATA drive when you can have something that looks great with the rest of your system? The HyperX Fury RGB SSD is tailor made for users who place looks at the top of their criteria list.
The HyperX Fury 480GB is a 2.5In SATA 6GB/s SSD that’s a non-standard 9.5mm in height. This makes it unsuitable for use in a laptop, though this is basically irrelevant given its purpose. This is a drive
you buy for its superb looks. Kingston doesn’t provide many details regarding the specifications or component specifics of the drive but we do know that the Marvell 88SS1074 controller is widely used among budget SSDs, so we don’t expect top end performance from the Hyper X Fury. We’re a little disappointed at the HyperX Fury’s three-year warranty as most manufacturers are moving to five-year warranties.
The undisputed highlight of the Fury SSD is its RGB functionality. It comes with a mini-USB to 4 pin RGB cable that allows you to connect the SSD to the 4 pin RGB header on many gaming motherboards. It can be daisy chained too. If you’re looking at an RGB SSD, the chances are it’s far from the only device that you’ll be needing to control! If you don’t plug it in, it will default to a red colour. The RGB LEDs can be controlled by all the major motherboard manufacturer’s software control applications. Overall the lighting is bright and vibrant. The drive itself also looks great, with a solid metal finish that’s befitting of a drive that focuses on aesthetics.
So we know it looks great, but how does it perform? The Fury RGB’s performance is middle of the road. The likes of the Samsung 860 Evo and Crucial MX500 perform better, but it’s not like the Fury RGB is a slug. It will do its job well, and function particularly well as a game library SSD. Its decent, if not terribly exciting read performance makes it well suited for that kind of use case where you’re likely to be using an NVMe SSD as the Windows drive.
At around $175 the Fury RGB is a lot of dollars compared to the significantly cheaper and better performing non-RGB competition. If it wasn’t for the RGB functionality we’d rate the Fury very poorly, but that’s not what this drive is about. It’s unabashedly designed to show off in a windowed case. So what if it costs a few 10s of dollars more? It serves a specific purpose and does it well. If you’re not interested in showing it off, of course you shouldn’t be looking at this drive in the first place.