It's April first, 2017 and the internet is awash with pranks. Google had Pac Maps and The Gnome, Amazon had an Alexa for your pets and NVIDIA brought you GeForce GTX G-Assist
Obviously this was a tongue-in-cheek prank orchestrated by NVIDIA but it sparked an internet firestorm. Nobody believed in G-Assist but everyone wanted a USB stick shaped like a Pascal GPU. Shortly after this NVIDIA did announce that they would be giving away 1080 (see what they did there?) of these drives through a GeForce Experience raffle. The drives haven't been available retail but a limited number were available internally and even fewer were sent out to select reviewers and one actually made it's way to my desk.
The GeForce GTX USB Drive has all the angular supercar styling of the of the Founder's Edition 10 series Pascal GPUs and the similarity to their larger counterparts doesn't stop there. Each drive comes packaged in a miniature stylized replica of the actual retail box.
While full tech specs are sparse, we know it has a USB3 interface and 64GB of storage and that's about all I could dig up.
With all the flash and sparse tech specs out of the way, let's look at performance. I tested the GTX USB drive against a Patriot Supersonic Express USB 3.0 thumb drive. The benchmark testbed is an ASUS Rampage V 10 Edition with a 5960x CPU, 32GB of Corsair Dominator Platinum DDR4 2400MHz RAM and running Windows 10 Pro.
I ran Crystal Disk Mark on each drive with 100MB, 500MB and 1GB samples and compared the sequential reads and writes with the following results:
Patriot USB GeForce GTX USB
The GTX USB starts off really strong with almost 2x read and 3x write speeds with a 1GB sample but the read speeds slowly taper off as the sample size is reduced while the write speeds went up. I ran the tests several times and the numbers stayed consistent.
When it's all said and done, the GeForce GTX USB Drive is pretty cool and it performs well and would probably sell well if NVIDIA was in the storage business. Since they're not, the public may never see these in the numbers that they'd like.
Friday, August 18, 2017
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