Teamgroup GE Pro review: Mid-tier PCIe 5.0 SSD performance

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2TB: $260 I 4TB: $450

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With the Pro in its name, I was expecting the GE Pro to eclipse the performance of the Teamgroup’s own Z540. Alas, it lagged behind its cousin and others in most tests. It’s a good PCIe 5.0 drive, it’s just not among the elite.

What are the Teamgroup GE Pro’s features?

The GE Pro is a PCIe 5.0 x4 (four lane), NVMe SSD in the standard 2280 (22mm wide, 80mm long) form factor. It features 512MB of DRAM per 1TB of capacity, and uses an InnoGrit IG5666 controller and 232-layer TLC (Triple-Level Cell/3-bit) NAND. Up to 33 percent of the available NAND may serve as secondary cache.

As you can see in the photo at the top of this article, the GE Pro ships with an attractive graphene heat spreader that you can stick to the chips shown above. If you’re using the SSD heavily, the heat spreader will help dissipate heat and stave off any thermal throttling that might occur.

Teamgroup rates the GE Pro for 700TBW (terabytes that may be written), which is about 100TBW more than average. That’s a nice little bonus, though end users would be hard-pressed to write anywhere near that much within the five-year warranty period.

How much is the Teamgroup GE Pro?

Currently available in 2TB and 4TB flavors, the GE Pro will set you back $260 and $450 if you pay full price. A 1TB model will be sold, but wasn’t available or priced at the time of this writing. Figure around $150 retail when it shows up.

How fast is the Teamgroup GE Pro?

Being PCIe 5.0, the GE Pro turned in some very good numbers. But they weren’t best-in-class by any means — ranking 13th place overall, behind even some PCIe 4.0 SSDs that offer better real-world performance. Among PCIe 5.0 drives, it was 9th in all tests, and 7th in CrystalDiskMark 8.

Note the very low single-queue read performance. Single-queue is the way most I/O is handled under Windows.

Unlike the sequential tests, the GE Pro was fine in CrystalDiskMark 8’s single-queue random tests, but fell off a bit in the multi-queue 4K tests.

Although not a crushing loss, the GE Pro still placed behind the competition in our 48GB transfers. Note that Windows uses only a single queue for file transfers.

Again, while not too far off the pace, the GE Pro lagged behind its competitors (Crucial T705, Corsair MP700 Pro SE, Teamgroup Z540) in the 450GB write.

Overall, the GE Pro is a fast drive — it’s just not as fast as its competitors. Again, that includes Teamgroup’s own Z540, a like-priced SSD, and which should probably be the model with “Pro” in its moniker.

Also, with PCIe 4.0 and HMB (Host Memory Buffer — using system memory for primary cache) designs available for so much less, there’s the question of do you really need any PCIe 5.0 SSD at this point in time. You’d be hard-pressed to tell the difference during even stressful use.

Should you buy the Teamgroup GE Pro?

The GE Pro is a very good SSD, but given its premium price and the fact that it placed in the lower echelon of the PCIe 5.0 charts, I can’t wholeheartedly recommend it. If the price is right, you won’t regret the purchase, but there are faster PCIe 5.0 SSDs available.

How we test

Drive tests currently utilize Windows 11, 64-bit running on an X790 (PCIe 4.0/5.0) motherboard/i5-12400 CPU combo with two Kingston Fury 32GB DDR5 4800MHz modules (64GB of memory total). Both 20Gbps USB and Thunderbolt 4 are integrated to the back panel and Intel CPU/GPU graphics are used. The 48GB transfer tests utilize an ImDisk RAM disk taking up 58GB of the 64GB of total memory. The 450GB file is transferred from a 2TB Samsung 990 Pro which also runs the OS.

Each test is performed on a newly NTFS-formatted and TRIM’d drive so the results are optimal. Note that in normal use, as a drive fills up, performance may decrease due to less NAND for secondary caching, as well as other factors. This can be less of a factor with the current crop of SSDs with far faster late-generation NAND.

Caveat: The performance numbers shown apply only to the drive we were shipped and to the capacity tested. SSD performance can and will vary by capacity due to more or fewer chips to shotgun reads/writes across and the amount of NAND available for secondary caching. Vendors also occasionally swap components. If you ever notice a large discrepancy between the performance you experience and that which we report, by all means, let us know.