It should be said that for modern gamers, the importance of high-speed SSDs is self-evident. Since the introduction of PC-level graphics technology in the eighth generation of consoles and the push of mainstream gaming platforms to 1080p and even 4K, the requirements for memory capacity and performance of video games, especially mainstream triple-A games, can be said to have snowballed. With the widespread popularity of SSD architectures in ninth-generation consoles, as well as the application of various GPU-accelerated storage technologies such as Microsoft DirectStorage and NVIDIA RTX IO, gamers, especially heavy gamers who pursue excellent gaming experiences, have an urgent need for high-performance SSDs. With the continuous development of domestic semiconductors, this field has also ushered in more and more players and new products, this time we also got a new flagship of an old brand, Yulian AS828 Ultra 2TB version, let's take a look.
Who is Yulian
Of course, one question that must be answered before conducting the review is who is the real thing. Although there may be very few people who know this name alone, when we dig deeper, we will find that Yulian is related to two major companies in the field of PC hardware: SiS Silicon Technology and Asus. To be precise, Yulian is a brand that focuses on the semiconductor storage market jointly invested by ASUS and Sitong Technology in 2007, and is now mainly operated by Shenzhen Shenglian Steel Co., Ltd., which was established in 2015, and their products are mainly around memory, SSDs, and at the same time operate the ASint CSM brand for OEMs and the Yulian brand for end consumers, and the Yulian AS828 evaluated today Ultra is their latest consumer flagship SSD product.
Exterior analysis and program introduction
As the latest flagship product of Yulian, the AS828 Ultra SSD adopts a prefabricated heatsink design that is increasingly common on flagship products, and gamers already have a weighty metal heatsink installed when they arrive, which can effectively cope with the temperature performance of modern SSDs under high loads.
Unlike the MP600 and other old-timers, the AS828 Ultra also takes into account the possibility of users using motherboards with built-in heatsinks, so this set of metal heatsinks can be removed with only four small screws, and there is no tamper-evident sticker to prevent users from removing it for other purposes, which should be given a great praise. The design of multiple M.2 slots on modern motherboards, especially mid-to-high-end motherboards, means that users using this SSD are likely to have a variety of use cases, and the built-in heatsink is not suitable for many occasions, so it is very gratifying to give users the choice.
At the same time, thermal pads are installed on both sides of the heatsink to effectively remove the temperature of the SSD.
The back of the radiator is labeled with information such as product model, capacity, and serial number. It can be seen that the Yulian team is very proud of their ASUS pedigree, and it is also prominently marked on the plate.
Of course, there is a scene that the original heatsink is absolutely suitable for: Sony PS5. We tested it on both OG's thick and new thin phones, and the cooler was a perfect fit for the PS5. If you're buying an SSD to expand the size of your PS5, it's good that you don't need to buy a heatsink to buy it.
After completing the initialization, the PS5 was able to recognize the model of our SSD normally, and it also had a full capacity of 2TB. Installing the ASint AS828 Ultra 2TB is a significant improvement over the meagrely small SSD that comes with the machine.
Turning to the bare board, the PCB of this solid-state drive adopts the scheme of double-sided four-paste particles + dual DRAM cache chips, and uses the IG5236 flagship PCIe G4 main controller from the domestic manufacturer Intenacit. This main control has also been adopted by manufacturers such as Zhiti, Lexar, Puket, and ADATA in their own high-end products, and the market share is still relatively good. At the same time, the DRAM cache uses two long-memory DP4D08G16HMB 8Gb/1GB DDR4 particles to form a 2GB cache space, which is in line with the common idea of 1TB NAND with 1GB DRAM, and the configuration is reasonable.
Using the FlashID query, you can see that this SSD uses four 512GB 128L TLC particles X2-9060 from YMTC. As a long-lasting third-generation 3D NAND chip, the X2-9060 is based on Xtacking 2.0 technology, compatible with the ONFI 4.2 standard, with a maximum IO speed of 1.6GT/s.
Plug in your computer and open CrystalDiskInfo. The ASint AS828 Ultra 2TB SSD was successfully identified. As you can see, it uses the PCIe G4x4 bus and supports the NVMe 1.4 standard.
Performance testing
Of course, whether it's a mule or a horse, you have to pull it out for a walk. We assembled our test bench using the configuration shown in the image. To ensure unleashed performance, the AS828 Ultra will be connected to the system through a channel directly connected to the CPU, and all system disks will run on the PCH link. At the same time, before the test, we optimized the performance by writing 0 to the whole disk, and used the default NTFS configuration of Windows to create partitions and format them.
In CystalDiskMark, the performance test was performed with 5 times of 1GB configuration, 70% read, 30% write, and the performance is shown in the figure. As you can see, in common multi-threaded read and write tests, the performance of this disk is very good. Although the performance of a single read is significantly weaker than that of a single write in a single-threaded operation, this scenario is difficult to occur in practice. In the hybrid read and write test, which is more suitable for the actual application environment, the performance of this disk is also quite outstanding, and it can easily meet the needs of users.
In the PCMark 10 storage test, which simulates everyday applications and workstation scenarios, the AS828 Ultra performed very well, achieving a score of 3255 points, which is a very outstanding performance.
In the 3DMark storage test, which is more suitable for gamer applications, the AS828 Ultra also performed well, achieving a score of 2841 points
Moving on to the lower level of testing, we used ATTO to test the performance of this solid state at different file depths of 4 depths. It can be seen that the optimization of this hard disk is biased towards reading small files and writing large files, which is in line with the needs of daily use.
Finally, we used Fio for an hour-long 128K write test. As you can see from the data graph, the SLC Cache policy application of this SSD is very stable, and the capacity is enough to meet the needs of daily use. Even in the case of the worst performance of TLC direct write + Write Back penalty, the speed can stably exceed GB/s. Although there is still some room for optimization in specific strategies, such performance is fully usable.
summary
As you can see from the data, the overall tuning style of the AS828 Ultra is biased towards read first, and although it does not perform well in low queue small file writes, it is also in line with our expectations for an SSD for consumer users and gamers. As the first Gen 4 flagship disk of the Yulian label, the performance of the AS828 Ultra is indeed remarkable, and we are very excited about the performance of its subsequent products.