Kingston Fury Renegade 2TB SSD review: "Consistently excellent performance across the board"

We'll get straight to the chase, the Kingston Fury Renegade SSD is one of the best SSDs for gaming that you can slot into your motherboard's M.2 port in 2022. At a time where the potential of Gen 4.0 NVMe drives continues to exceed expectations launching into the third year on the market, Kingston has proved that it knows how to deliver consistently excellent performance across the board. 

Whether you've been considering making the jump over from a more traditional SATA SSD, considering the upgrade from a slower Gen 3.0 SSD, or just wanting more consistent current-generation performance, then the Kingston Fury Renegade excels at everything you throw at it. However, given that its 2TB configuration will cost you a staggering $424.99 / £430 - it's far from the cheapest option you can get. 

Kingston Fury Renegade SSD review: Design and features

The Kingston Fury Renegade SSD utilizes a Phison E18 Gen 4x4 controller in order to deliver some incredible numbers that aren't always seen in drives of this current NVMe generation. 

On the aesthetics front, there really isn't much to talk about - for all the difference that looks make. The Kingston Fury Renegade aims for efficiency over flashiness, and this is evident in its clean black and white visual design. Speaking of its physical build, though, there's a built-in low-profile graphene aluminum heat spreader for keeping the core temperatures down as well. 

We found in our testing that the Kingston Fury Renegade SSD kept well below its max operating temperature of 70 degrees (it peaked at 68 degrees), which is impressive for something as thin and lightweight as this. We normally only observe heat readings like this from our thicker, dedicated motherboard heatsinks, so it's clearly doing the job here. 

Kingston Fury Renegade SSD review: Performance

There's no debate that the Kingston Fury Renegade SSD is one of the fastest Gen 4.0 models on the market right now as the numbers proposed by the company have certainly been met. It was claimed the drive could achieve up to 7,300 read and 7,000 MB/s write respectively. Our testing proved that this level of performance was very much the case, as our CrystalDiskMark scores of 7,344.99 read and 6,874.21 write reveal. The total Anvil score was just as commendable: 21,649.35 overall. 

Those are some seriously fast figures, however, they would mean nothing if the actual real-world performance wasn't adhered to. For example, most PC gamers have had to transfer games from one drive to another, especially as NVMe drives continue to become faster. We tested this ourselves with another Gen 4.0 drive and were absolutely blown away by the write speeds on display from some of the larger games in our library. 

Take, for instance, CyberPunk 2077 (and its 64.88 GB file) which was transferred over from another NVMe SSD to the Kingston Fury Renegade in only 22.66 seconds. Destiny 2 (full to bursting with several years of DLC at a staggering 73.5 GB) made the jump over to the Renegade in a similarly impressive 28 seconds. If you're someone that wants to have all your games in one place ready to take advantage of DirectStorage, which will utilize Gen 4.0 SSD performance in the latest titles, then you can rest easy knowing that the handover process shouldn't take too long at all.

What about in-game loading times then? Halo Infinite on PC is a bit of a frontrunner for stellar optimization (when it comes to loading from a faster SSD) and the Kingston Fury Renegade SSD is no different. We were able to launch straight into gameplay from the main menu (into a campaign mission) in only 18 seconds. How about coming back from a death screen when Master Chief catches a couple of bullets? Well, we couldn't even clock a second here, that's how fast we're talking.

Kingston Fury Renegade SSD review: Should you buy it? 

We can wholeheartedly endorse the Kingston Fury Renegade SSD as one of the best gaming SSDs. It's also worth noting, due to its form factor and built-in heat spreader that it's an easy contender for one of the best PS5 SSDs on the market too - though you could add your own extra heatsink to be sure from this perspective.

Be forewarned, as with other faster drives of its ilk, it can get pricey at 2TB and up, but if you're someone that wants incredibly fast, and consistent performance then there's very little that the Kingston Fury Renegade SSD can't do.