PNY Shows Off Gaming-grade microSD Express Card for Gaming Handhelds

[btarunr]

PNY at the 2025 Computex showcased its XLR8 GeForce RTX 50-series "Blackwell" graphics card lineup spanning everything from the flagship RTX 5090, down to the "game changing" GeForce RTX 5060, which just hit the shelves earlier this week. We begin our tour with the PNY EX series gaming flash memory meant for handheld gaming consoles. These MicroSD Express cards implement the SD Express standard that's based on NVMe, with a PCIe Gen 3 x1 connection at the physical layer. You get sequential read speeds of up to 890 MB/s and sequential write speeds of up to 750 MB/s, both of which exceed the performance of SATA SSDs, making them fit for most game storage scenarios. The card comes win 128 GB and 256 GB sizes.



View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[Prima.Vera]

Wait. I just bought a microSD card that does 150MB writes and was considered one of the fastest until now. How come the speed jump is so huge?!?

 

[Chaitanya]

Wait. I just bought a microSD card that does 150MB writes and was considered one of the fastest until now. How come the speed jump is so huge?!?

PCI-e 1x interface with NVME instead ancient SDIO with SPI.

 

[watzupken]

Wait. I just bought a microSD card that does 150MB writes and was considered one of the fastest until now. How come the speed jump is so huge?!?

On paper, it’s a lot faster. In reality, it’s likely going to throttle due to heat and won’t be running at the kind of speed. It’s also very expensive. So you are actually not missing anything.

 

[Lianna]

The card comes win 128 GB and 256 GB sizes.

Aside from obvious typo, there's nothing "win" for these sizes. The biggest uSD Express I've seen advertised max out at 1 TB, while SanDisk's uSDXC is available in 2 TB.

Wait. I just bought a microSD card that does 150MB writes and was considered one of the fastest until now. How come the speed jump is so huge?!?

The problem is, currently this card probably is UP TO as fast as yours (or maybe slower as reportedly backward compatibility lacks UHS-II mode due to pin reuse) in any common reader and/or device on the market NOW.
That's also why we don't have reviews or comparisons that would say how fast they are in reality.

 

[lexluthermiester]

512GB or 1TB cards? That's what I'm looking for..

 

[Prima.Vera]

512GB or 1TB cards? That's what I'm looking for..

there you go:

https://www.lexar.com/global/products/Lexar-PLAY-PRO-microSDXC-Express-Card/