Gigabyte has just released a range of new PCIe 5.0 SSDs that boast blistering raw read and write speeds. The Gigabyte Aorus Gen5 14000 won’t take any awards for imaginative naming, but it may be just what you want if you’re after a speedy main gaming SSD.
Arriving in 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB variations, the most capacious of Gigabyte‘s new best gaming SSD contenders can go as high as a 14.5GB/s sequential read speed and 12.7GB/s sequential write speed. The smaller drives run a little slower, but they’re still blazing quick options.
The drives all use 3D TLC NAND flash coupled to a Phison PS5026-E26 controller, all in an M.2 2280 form factor, which is fine for a desktop PC, but they won’t fit in a Steam Deck, for instance. However, we wouldn’t recommend quite such premium drives for this use even if they could fit – they would be complete overkill.
Instead, the speeds Gigabytes claims for these drives would make them among the fastest SSDs available, taking on the likes of the Crucial T705 and comfortably surpassing many other PCIe 5.0 competitors such as the Corsair MP700 Pro.
That makes them useful as boot drives and game-storage drives for your main gaming PC, but even then this level of speed is far from necessary, as most games still struggle to truly take advantage of the speed on offer. That extra speed will be handy if you regularly shift a lot of files between drives, though.
| Model | Capacity | Sequential read | Sequential write |
| AG514K1TB | 1TB | 13,600MB/s (13.6GB/s) | 10,200MB/s (10.2GB/s) |
| AG514K2TB | 2TB | 14,500MB/s (14.5GB/s) | 12,700MB/s (12.7GB/s) |
| AG514K4TB | 4TB | 14,100MB/s (14.1GB/s) | 12,600MB/s (12.6GB/s) |
The PCIe 5.0 x4 interface used by these drives is in theory limited to a maximum speed of 15.8GB/s but, so far, 14.5GB/s seems to be the effective limit, with no standard M.2 drives exceeding these speeds. The drive is also backward compatible with PCIe 4.0 and PCIe 3.0 SSD slots, but the maximum speed of the drive will be limited to those slot speeds (around 7GB/s and 3.5GB/s respectively).
Surprisingly for a PCIe 5.0 drive, the Aorus Gen5 1400 doesn’t include a heatsink. As such, you’ll need to ensure either your motherboard has a quality M.2 heatsink, or you have some other M.2 cooling system, as we’ve found PCIe 5.0 drives at these speeds can run very hot.
There’s no release date or price for these drives yet, but don’t expect them to be cheap with these specs. In the meantime, we recommend checking out the WD Black SN850X, as it’s a great mid-range drive that’s plenty fast enough for most gaming PC builds.