With the MP600 Pro LPX SSD, Corsair is going specifically after the large PlayStation gamer crowd. Sony has opened the internal storage of their PS5 console up for upgrades, allowing standard M.2 NVMe drives to be installed. Corsair seized this opportunity and created a drive that seems specifically optimized to reduce game-loading times on the PlayStation 5, and as our results show, on the PC, too.

Internally, Corsair is using the same Phison E18 controller as on the plain MP600 Pro, but certainly with newer firmware, and possibly additional tweaks for this usage model. Corsair has been vague in their reviewer guide and only talks about "optimized for PS5" without mentioning whether it is the physical form factor only or firmware settings, too. What's clearly upgraded is the TLC NAND flash that's now Micron 176-layer instead of the slower 96-layer NAND on the MP600 Pro. A DRAM cache for the mapping tables of the SSD is included, too, of course. 2 GB of fast DDR4-3200 from Hynix are used.

Synthetic performance results of the MP600 Pro LPX are excellent across the board. The drive achieves top scores in all categories, the highlight here is probably 512K sequential writes, which set a new record with 5.5 GB/s, almost 400 MB/s higher than the regular MP600, and 1.5 GB/s higher than Samsung 980 Pro. For game load times, read speeds are more important, though. Sequential read and random read of the MP600 Pro LPX are pretty much identical to the MP600 Pro, which would suggest negligible improvements. Good that our SSD reviews focus on real-life performance using actual games and applications, at 80% disk full.

The real-life test results are excellent, 1% faster than the MP600 Pro, which means the XPG Atom 50 is beat by 1%, too. The MP600 Pro LPX is now able to match the Samsung 980 Pro and is only 1% behind the Kingston KC3000 and WD Black SN850—the fastest drives we ever tested. Compared to PCIe 3.0 drives, the performance difference is between 5% and 15%. If we look at gaming specifically, things become interesting. The MP600 Pro LPX very clearly shows game load times superior to all these drives. While it doesn't win every single game load test, there's clearly something going on here, especially when compared to the Kingston KC3000, which uses the same controller and NAND flash. Maybe it's the faster DRAM—3200 vs. 2666, or firmware optimizations, but the bottom line is that the MP600 Pro LPX is the best drive on the market today when it comes to game load times, even on the PC.

If you take a closer look at our game load tests results, you'll realize that the relative differences are VERY small. We're talking sub-second differences. Nothing you'd notice subjectively. What's important for gaming, too, is how quickly you can copy data to the drive, and the MP600 Pro LPX can impress here as well. With 5.5 GB/s max and 3.2 GB/s on average to fill the whole 2 TB capacity, Corsair's latest offering beats the fastest drives in our test group conclusively, even the MLC-based Samsung 970 Pro can't keep up. The SLC cache size is very reasonable, too, with 210 GB.

Sony's PS5 compatibility requirements mandate that the drive has a heatsink. Corsair has paired a very decent thermal solution with the MP600 Pro LPX, and it's standard-sized, so it will work perfectly even when the drive is installed in a PC. In our thermal stress test, we couldn't get the drive to thermally throttle at all, mostly thanks to Phison's energy-efficient controller design, but the heatsink works well, too. With 71°C measured temperature, the drive doesn't really get that warm—we're often seeing over 100°C on high-end M.2 NVMe drives in that test. That's great news for the PS5, of course, as it means you don't have to worry about thermal throttling. Thermals are actually not a big deal on the PS5 due to the sporadic activity and adequate passive airflow design, but it never hurts to have better cooling.

Priced at $340 for the tested 2 TB version, the Corsair MP600 Pro LPX is not cheap even though it's similarly priced to the biggest competitors, which are the Samsung 980 Pro ($350 with heatsink, $330 without) and WD Black SN850 ($330 with heatsink, $350 without). The Kingston KC3000 is too expensive at $390. If you're focused specifically on gaming performance, the MP600 Pro LPX should be your choice. If workloads are a mix, I'd probably pick the WD Black SN850 assuming identical pricing. $350 for 2 TB is still a ton of money, so don't be afraid to consider PCIe 3.0 SSDs for gaming and applications on even the PS5—the real-life differences are minimal, and the money saved can be used for something else.