PNY’s XLR8 CS3140 M.2 SSD deliver industry-leading performance with 7,500 MB/s read speeds

This SSD is due to release this month, using an unknown 12nm controller to deliver high power efficiency levels and top-of-the-line SSD performance. Read speeds of 7,500MB/s push the limits of what is possible with the PCIe 4.0 interface within the M.2 form factor, making this SSD one of the fastest possible PCIe 4.0 M.2 drives possible, at least in terms of sequential read performance.  

The PNY XLR8 Gaming CS3140 will release with both 1TB and 2TB version, and with and without a heatsink. With most motherboards including dedicated M.2 cooling solutions and most laptops lacking the space for a bulky M.2 heatsink, our advice is to purchase the heatsink-less version. Unless you like the aesthetic of PNY’s heatsink, your motherboard’s M.2 cooling solution will probably look better than larger custom offerings. 

With this being a PCIe 4.0 SSD, the PNY XLR8 CS3140 should be used on a PC with supports PCIe 4.0 connectivity. This means that you should use an AMD system with Ryzen 3000 or 5000 processors or a system Intel’s upcoming 11th Generation Rocket Lake CPUs. Note that these processors will still need a motherboard which features PCIe 4.0 support. Using this SSD on a PCIe 3.0 system will literally halve this SSD’s performance.