G'afternoon, good gerbils. Recently I moved over to an NVMe SSD, and I can tell you a couple things. The first is that for regular usage, it'll do very little for you compared to the vast majority of SATA drives. The second thing that I can tell you is that when you do get it going (in my case, for heavy-duty VM work, wrangling big Windows images, and handling tons of small files at once), it's going to set your heart positively alight. But enough chit-chat, we're here for deals, right? Here's today's selection.
- Well dang, today is cheap NAND day. Prices for permanent transistor bit storage have fallen through the floor, and they're on track to reach the lower layers of the Earth's crust soon. The first drive on hand is the Adata SU800 2 TB. This drive is speedy enough for any purpose short of power-user work with its 560 MB/s sequential read and 520 MB/s write speeds. The price is a stupid-low $209.99 at Rakuten with the checkout code AD40.
- Next up, one of my personal favorites, the Crucial MX500. It's one of the finer SATA drives around, and it can push 560 MB/s on reads and 510 MB/s on writes. Solid random I/O is where this drive is at, though, at 95K IOPS for reads and 90K IOPS for writes. You can get one of these in 500 GB size for $61.74 at Newegg with the cart code SSDSAVE, or pick up the bigger 1-TB drive for $113.04, also with the SSDSAVE code.
- Following along to system components, how about a pretty nice case? The Corsair Carbide Spec-06 RGB is a roomy ATX enclosure with a tempered-glass side panel and RGB LED lighting on the front in a sleek and subdued style. The chassis come with two 120-mm fans and can take in radiators as long as 360 mm. Take this case home for $59.99 from Newegg with the cart code EMCERES32.
- It would be a faux pas to put an el-cheapo board inside that nice case. For a Socket AM4 build, you'd be well-served by the Asus ROG Strix X470-F Gaming. This pack o' slots offers up to M.2 slots, an integrated I/O shield, onboard RGB LED lighting, Intel-powered Gigabit Ethernet, and Realtek S1220A audio codec. Put this mobo in your system for $169.99 from Newegg if you use the cart code EMCERES26.
- We've always thought that the Surface Laptop was one of the best of its breed thanks to its combination of a sleek form factor, a gorgeous display, and a comfortable keyboard-and-trackpad combo. The price was always its sticking point, but not today. You can grab a first-gen Surface Laptop with a seventh-generation Core i5 CPU, 8 GB of RAM, and a 128-GB SSD for only $699 at Best Buy.
- Good sound is a bliss that unfortunately far too many people deprive themselves of. We can help. The Sennheiser HD 600 is a well-known set of open-back cans with much-lauded sound quality. It has a comfortable padded headband and a detachable cable that's handy for when you inevitably trip on it. The frequency response should go from gut-shaking lows at 12 Hz to dog-whistle territory at 39 KHz. The impedance is 300 Ω, so be sure to plug these into a contemporary mobo, sound card, or headphone amp. The price is $249 at Amazon, a far cry from the $300 or more these headphones usually command.
That's all for today, folks! There's a chance you're looking for something we haven't covered. If that's the case, you can help The Tech Report by using the following referral links when you're out shopping: not only do we have a partnership with Newegg and Amazon, but we also work with Best Buy, Adorama, Rakuten, Walmart, and Sam's Club. For more specific needs, you can also shop with our links at Das Keyboard's shop.