[Hardware] Team Group T-Force Cardea II TUF Gaming Alliance 1TB NVMe Review

[_Happy boy]

Team Group takes the TUF Gaming Alliance to new heights with the introduction of the T-Force Cardea II TUF Gaming Alliance SSD lineup. They may not have reinvented the wheel with their current lineup to create this one but they have taken their well-received Cardea II drives and given them a fresh new look to fit in with the TUF theme and branding. According to Team Group, these drives are the first M.2 PCIe SSD that is carrying the TUF Gaming Alliance branding to fit in with the ASUS TUF Gaming Alliance moniker.

If the specifications of the Cardea II TUF seem similar to the normal Cardea II then that's easy to explain since the only surface difference in them is the color palette swap from red to black with the addition of the TUF Gaming Alliance screen print. Both versions of the drives carry a 5-year product warranty showing Team Group stands behind their products. The T-Force Cardea II TUF Gaming Alliance SSDs come in two sizes, a 512GB and a 1TB priced at $72.99 and $139.99 respectively.

 

First Look At T-Force Cardea II TUF Gaming – Unboxing And Closer Look
The packaging of the T-Force Cardea II TUF Gaming is quite an eye-catching and colorful design. But, it's not just pomp and circumstance as they've packed some useful information on the box as well. The front of the box carries a lot of marketing hype with the advertized 15% cool down thanks to the included heatsink, support for S.M.A.R.T, and TRIM. The back features details worthy of praise as so many SSD makers hide this information; You'll find interface information (PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe 1.3), Voltage, Operating temperatures, AND Crystal Disk Mark information for both drives. Technically you'll get information for all THREE Cardea II drives since they list the 256GB model in there as well.

 

 

The drive itself is a fairly standard affair. I could complain that Team Group used a blue PCB on the drives that are kind of a moot complaint as it's covered by a robust black heatsink that manages to not come off overly flashy. The heatsink is quite functional and is clearly designed to sincerely dissipate heat and not just act as a showpiece to boost your ego.

 

 

 

 

 

There is cause for concern, however. The heatsink is quite tall and if it's installed in a location behind the primary GPU and not above it on the motherboard it could pose itself to be problematic. There is a solution here, but it kinda defeats the reasoning for picking this particular drive, remove the heatsink. Removing the heatsink is possible and it isn't hard to do, but if you have to do that in order to use it then you really should consider saving a few bucks and looking at another drive.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our test bench is now using the Ryzen 9 3900X on the ASUS TUF Gaming X570 Pro-WiFi so that now we have access to be able to take PCIe Gen 4 drives into account. We have the Ryzen 9 3900X clocked at 4.3GHz all core with the Hyper X Predator DDR4 3600 CL17.  Before starting the tests I loaded the NVMe drive up to 60% capacity so that the testing would not be run on a clean empty drive.

 

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