Installation and Operation:

The Kingston HyperX Predator was installed in an x4 PCIe slot and the system was booted up. Windows had no problem configuring the card and installing the necessary drivers on its own, and within just a bit of time it was ready to use. The first thing I did was to grab a screen capture of what CrystalDiskInfo had to say about the drive...



Nothing exciting was revealed there, and with that it was definitely time to start testing the performance.



Testing:

CrystalDiskMark 4.0.3 x64:

Before getting to the benchmarks to be used to compare the HyperX Predator to other SSDs, a couple warm up runs of CrystalDiskMark 4.0.3 x64 were executed. The program was run both in its default mode which simulates incompressible data being transferred, as well as with the program set to "0 Fill", which simulates compressible data being transferred. Testing in these modes can have a great impact on some SSDs, depending on what type of controller they utilize. What we see from the results below (default mode on the left, 0 fill on the right) is that the Predator and its Marvell 88SS9293 controller are unaffected by the type of data being transferred. Read and write speeds were able to exceed the published specifications, and that is definitely a good start.