Conclusion
This is our first review of a Lexar SSD, in particular the Lexar Professional NM800 PRO with heatsink 1TB M.2 PCIe Gen4x4 NVMe SSD. The Lexar Professional NM800 PRO comes in a model without heatsink, or with an integrated heatsink. Lexar offers a 512MB, 1TB, and 2TB capacities of this SSD. The Lexar NM800 PRO is a 3D TLC NAND flash-based SSD with DRAM cache and uses the InnoGrit IG5236 controller and 176-Layer Micron TLC NAND flash. The 1TB model we reviewed today is rated at 7500MB/s sequential read speeds and 6300MB/s sequential write speeds, offering top-tier PCIe Gen4 x4 performance.
Cooling
The Lexar NM800 PRO 1TB SSD we have reviewed is the model that comes with an integrated heatsink pre-installed. We saw that the heatsink has a thermal pad for the chips, and a thermal pad underneath with a fully enclosed unit front and back. In our stress test temperature testing, where we really push the SSD hard, this is the “worse case” scenario writing data for 20 minutes, the temperature of the ASIC/controller rose to about 74c maximum temperature.
This was the second warmest SSD on our graph, but the Acer Predator GM7000 ran much hotter, so the Lexar NM800 PRO does run cooler than that one. Also, keep in mind, the Lexar was performing very well, so that performance does come with a little more heat generation, just like the Acer Predator GM7000.
In general use, the temperatures were lower, in the ’50s. Here are all the reported temperatures for this SSD. The drive temperature was 57c, the ASIC temperature was 74c, and there were two other temperature points that are unidentified, but likely the 4th one is related to drive temperature, we don’t know what the 3rd reading is. Overall, these temperatures are not terrible, the SSD was not throttling at these temps. We definitely recommend getting this SSD with the heatsink or installing your own with your motherboard, we would not recommend running this SSD without a heatsink or you might get throttling.
Performance
Lexar has put in a good showing with the Lexar Professional NM800 PRO 1TB SSD. It has very fast sequential performance in read and writes. In CrystalDiskMark it performed at the top of the charts, competitive with the other high-end PCIe Gen4 x4 NVMe SSDs. It performed exactly as it was advertised, hitting its advertised performance. It also had good random read and write performance, punching above several SSDs on RND4K Q32T16 with the second-fastest read performance, and the second-fastest write performance. In the RND4K Q1T1 testing, which is more typical of performance in day-to-day activities, the read performance was above average, but the write performance was on the lower end by a small margin.
The Lexar Professional NM800 PRO 1TB SSD performed very well in file copy performance, so if you are copying large files onto the SSD, off the SSD, or to and from different volumes on the SSD it should perform well. In game scene loading it fell behind, with one of the slowest times. It made up for that, however, in content creation and workstation performance it performed very well in SPECworkstation 3.1. It was also very consistent in ATTO with competitive performance. The full storage benchmark of PCMark 10 had average performance and average access time, but it did well in the smaller workload traces of the quick system benchmark of PCMark 10.
Final Points
Lexar has advertised the NM800 PRO as designed for hardcore gamers, professionals, and creators. It seems to us like it has carried out this goal, it does really well for creators and professionals with large data transfer performance and content creation and workstation applications. It certainly meets the advertised performance and can keep up in both sequential and random reads and writes as a top-tier performer as a PCIe Gen4 x4 NVMe SSD. It also has an above-average TBW (Terabytes Written) endurance rating.
One thing the Lexar Professional NM800 PRO SSD is missing, which would put the icing on the cake, is SSD management software. These types of software applications are able to check drive health, warn if drive health gets low, protect against wear leveling, and manage things like overprovision, encryption, and secure erase features. In addition, software such as this can check for firmware updates, and allow new firmware to be applied. One suggestion we’d leave for Lexar is to create some special sauce software to manage their SSDs in this way. It would certainly add more features and usability to professionals and workstation-class environments. There are third-party applications, with these features, and you’ll have to resort to them with this SSD.
With pricing currently at $77.99 on Amazon at this promotion, this 1TB SSD is a great deal if you need a fast PCIe Gen4 x4 NVMe SSD. We recommend the model with a heatsink unless you for sure have your own motherboard heatsink to use.