Team Group takes the TUF Gaming Alliance to new heights with the introduction of the T-Force Cardea II TUF Gaming Alliance SSD lineup. They may not have reinvented the wheel with their current lineup to create this one but they have taken their well-received Cardea II drives and given them a fresh new look to fit in with the TUF theme and branding. According to Team Group, these drives are the first M.2 PCIe SSD that is carrying the TUF Gaming Alliance branding to fit in with the ASUS TUF Gaming Alliance moniker.

If the specifications of the Cardea II TUF seem similar to the normal Cardea II then that's easy to explain since the only surface difference in them is the color palette swap from red to black with the addition of the TUF Gaming Alliance screen print. Both versions of the drives carry a 5-year product warranty showing Team Group stands behind their products. The T-Force Cardea II TUF Gaming Alliance SSDs come in two sizes, a 512GB and a 1TB priced at $72.99 and $139.99 respectively.

Related Story Team Group T-Force Xtreem 48 GB DDR5-8200 Memory Kit Review: Built For Tuners!

First Look At T-Force Cardea II TUF Gaming – Unboxing And Closer Look

The packaging of the T-Force Cardea II TUF Gaming is quite an eye-catching and colorful design. But, it's not just pomp and circumstance as they've packed some useful information on the box as well. The front of the box carries a lot of marketing hype with the advertized 15% cool down thanks to the included heatsink, support for S.M.A.R.T, and TRIM. The back features details worthy of praise as so many SSD makers hide this information; You'll find interface information (PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe 1.3), Voltage, Operating temperatures, AND Crystal Disk Mark information for both drives. Technically you'll get information for all THREE Cardea II drives since they list the 256GB model in there as well.

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The drive itself is a fairly standard affair. I could complain that Team Group used a blue PCB on the drives that are kind of a moot complaint as it's covered by a robust black heatsink that manages to not come off overly flashy. The heatsink is quite functional and is clearly designed to sincerely dissipate heat and not just act as a showpiece to boost your ego.

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There is cause for concern, however. The heatsink is quite tall and if it's installed in a location behind the primary GPU and not above it on the motherboard it could pose itself to be problematic. There is a solution here, but it kinda defeats the reasoning for picking this particular drive, remove the heatsink. Removing the heatsink is possible and it isn't hard to do, but if you have to do that in order to use it then you really should consider saving a few bucks and looking at another drive.

T-Force CARDEA II TUF Gaming Alliance SSD Lineup

CARDEA II TUF Gaming Alliance SSD 512GB CARDEA II TUF Gaming Alliance SSD 1TB
ControllerPhison PS5012-E12Phison PS5012-E12
NAND FlashToshiba 64L TLC FlashToshiba 64L TLC Flash
Sequential Read3400 MB/s3400 MB/s
Sequential Write2000 MB/s3000 MB/s
IOPs Read350,000 IOPS MAX450,000 IOPS MAX
IOPs Write300,000 IOPS Max400,000 IOPS MAX
Warranty5 Years5 Years
Price$72.99$139.99

Testing Setup

Our test bench is now using the Ryzen 9 3900X on the ASUS TUF Gaming X570 Pro-WiFi so that now we have access to be able to take PCIe Gen 4 drives into account. We have the Ryzen 9 3900X clocked at 4.3GHz all core with the Hyper X Predator DDR4 3600 CL17.  Before starting the tests I loaded the NVMe drive up to 60% capacity so that the testing would not be run on a clean empty drive.

ComponentModel
CPUAMD Ryzen 9 3900X @ 4.3GHz All Core
MotherboardASUS TUF Gaming X570 Pro-WiFi
MemoryHyper X Predator 2x16GB (32GB) 3600MHz CL17
PSUCooler Master V1200P
OSWindows 10-64 Bit
GPUNVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti FE
CaseLian Li T70X

T-Force Cardea II TUF Gaming Alliance SSD

ATTO Disk Benchmark

As the industry’s leading provider of high-performance storage & network connectivity products, ATTO has created a widely-accepted Disk Benchmark freeware software to help measure storage system performance. As one of the top tools utilized in the industry, Disk Benchmark identifies performance in hard drives, solid state drives, RAID arrays as well as the host connection to attached storage. Top drive manufacturers, like Hitachi, build and test every drive using the ATTO Disk Benchmark.

The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host bus adapters (HBAs), hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.

ATTO Write
512B
1KB
2KB
4KB
8KB
16KB
32KB
64KB
128KB
256KB
512KB
1MB
2MB
4MB
8MB
0
500
1000
1500
2000
2500
3000
0
500
1000
1500
2000
2500
3000
T-Force Cardea II TUF Gaming
50
100
207
399
767
1.4k
2.4k
2.8k
2.8k
2.8k
2.8k
2.7k
2.8k
2.8k
2.8k
HP EX950 1TB NVMe
65
142
285
556
1k
1.7k
2.3k
2.5k
2.7k
2.8k
2.8k
2.8k
2.8k
2.8k
2.8k
Kingston KC2000 1TB NVMe
71
154
310
593
1k
1.6k
2.1k
2.1k
2.1k
2.1k
2.1k
2.1k
2.1k
2.1k
2.1k
Kingston KC2500 1TB NVMe
68
135
278
547
982
1.6k
2.2k
2.4k
2.5k
2.6k
2.6k
2.6k
2.6k
2.6k
2.6k
Samsung 970 Evo Plus 1TB NVMe
75
148
288
552
1.2k
2.2k
2.9k
3k
3k
3k
3k
3k
3k
3k
3k
WD Black SN750 1TB NVMe w/HS
10
30
68
610
1.1k
1.9k
2.7k
2.8k
2.8k
2.8k
2.8k
2.8k
2.8k
2.8k
2.8k
ATTO Read
512B
1KB
2KB
4KB
8KB
16KB
32KB
64KB
128KB
256KB
512KB
1MB
2MB
4MB
8MB
0
700
1400
2100
2800
3500
4200
0
700
1400
2100
2800
3500
4200
T-Force Cardea II TUF Gaming
51
102
213
443
797
1.5k
2.4k
2.8k
2.8k
2.9k
2.9k
2.9k
2.9k
2.9k
2.9k
HP EX950 1TB NVMe
75
150
323
626
1k
2k
2.6k
2.7k
2.9k
3.1k
3.1k
3.1k
3.1k
3.1k
3.1k
Kingston KC2000 1TB NVMe
85
170
352
687
1.1k
2k
2.5k
2.8k
2.9k
2.9k
2.9k
2.9k
2.9k
2.9k
2.9k
Kingston KC2500 1TB NVMe
76
157
330
645
1k
2.8k
3k
3.1k
3.1k
3.1k
3.1k
3.1k
3.1k
3.1k
3.1k
Samsung 970 Evo Plus 1TB NVMe
74
150
317
597
1.1k
2.4k
2.8k
3k
3.1k
3.1k
3.1k
3.2k
3.3k
3.2k
3.2k
WD Black SN750 1TB NVMe w/HS
12
24
52
414
644
895
1.8k
2.1k
2.3k
2.7k
3.1k
3.3k
3.3k
3.3k
3.3k

Crystal Disk Mark 6.0

CrystalDiskMark is a disk benchmark software Made by a Japanese coder named Hiyohiyo and is one of the simplest and most frequently used tests for storage due to its simple and easy to understand UI. It measure sequential reads/writes speed,measure random 512KB, 4KB, 4KB (Queue Depth=32) reads/writes speed,select test data (Random, 0Fill, 1Fill).

CrystalDiskMark 6
4KB Q1T1 Read
4KB Q1T1
4KB Q32T1 Read
4KB Q32T1 Write
4KB Q8T8 Read
4KB Q8T8 Write
Sequential Reads
Sequential Writes
0
700
1400
2100
2800
3500
4200
0
700
1400
2100
2800
3500
4200
T-Force Cardea II TUF Gaming
58
198
648
603
1.3k
2.3k
3.1k
3k
HP EX950 1TB NVMe
65
166
592
479
1.3k
1.5k
3.5k
3.1k
Kingston KC2000 1TB NVMe
60
169
603
503
1.4k
1.4k
3.2k
2.3k
Kingston KC2500 1TB NVMe
60
154
557
412
1.4k
1.4k
3.5k
2.9k
Samsung 970 Evo Plus 1TB NVMe
50
168
554
467
1.5k
2.2k
3.6k
3.3k
WD Black SN750 1TB NVMe w/HS
51
184
551
431
1.7k
2k
3.5k
3k

AS SSD

AS SSD is the opposite of ATTO as it uses incompressible data rather than compressible data and simulates the worst possible scenario imaginable for an SSD which gives the best understanding of performance when pushing the drive to its limits.

We separate the IOPS and MB/s in the results for ease of reading.

AS SSD MB/s
4K Read
4k Write
4KB 64T Read
4k 64T Write
Sequential Reads
Sequential Writes
0
700
1400
2100
2800
3500
4200
0
700
1400
2100
2800
3500
4200
T-Force Cardea II TUF Gaming
68
175
1.7k
2.8k
2.8k
2.8k
HP EX950 1TB NVMe
65
184
1.3k
1.3k
3k
2.6k
Kingston KC2000 1TB NVMe
60
190
1.4k
1.3k
2.8k
2.1k
Kingston KC2500 1TB NVMe
61
178
1.4k
1.3k
3k
2.5k
Samsung 970 Evo Plus 1TB NVMe
54
187
1.6k
2.4k
3k
2.9k
WD Black SN750 1TB NVMe w/HS
50
201
1.7k
2.1k
3.1k
2.8k
AS SSD IOPS
16MB Read
16MB Write
4K Read
4K Write
512B Read
512B Write
4KB 64T Read
4KB 64T Write
0
120650
241300
361950
482600
603250
723900
0
120650
241300
361950
482600
603250
723900
T-Force Cardea II TUF Gaming
172
171
17.5k
40.2k
37.6k
47.1k
452.3k
723.9k
HP EX950 1TB NVMe
186
162
16.9k
46.9k
50.1k
48.1k
322.9k
339.1k
Kingston KC2000 1TB NVMe
174
128
15.4k
48.3k
19.9k
51.1k
352.9k
332.9k
Kingston KC2500 1TB NVMe
187
148
15.7k
45.7k
48k
46.6k
349.4k
328.3k
Samsung 970 Evo Plus 1TB NVMe
187
180
14.1k
47.7k
40.7k
50.6k
418.2k
630.6k
WD Black SN750 1TB NVMe w/HS
191
172
12.8k
51.6k
14.2k
47.6k
428.2k
570.1k

ANVIL's Storage Utilities

Anvil's Storage Utilities benchmark may be a bit of an older benchmark, but it's still very much relevant today.  It takes various performance and response time metrics and gives them a score in read and writes then delivers an overall rating, which is useful to see where an HDD or SSD slots in general performance.

Anvil's Storage Utilities
Read Score
Write Score
Total Score
0
4000
8000
12000
16000
20000
24000
0
4000
8000
12000
16000
20000
24000
T-Force Cardea II TUF Gaming
5.5k
10.3k
15.8k
HP EX950 1TB NVMe
6.2k
10k
16.2k
Kingston KC2000 1TB NVMe
6.2k
9.2k
15.4k
Kingston KC2500 1TB NVMe
6.6k
9.4k
16k
Samsung 970 Evo Plus 1TB NVMe
6.6k
10.5k
17.1k
WD Black SN750 1TB NVMe w/HS
6.4k
12k
18.5k

Conclusion

The Team Group T-Force Cardea II TUF Gaming Alliance SSD 1TB version comes in right about where it should in terms of performance for the money. There are a lot of options in this price range so you'll want to consider your options carefully. The heatsink does it's job as in our testing the driver never came out of the 35-39C range under heavy load on an open test bench. Now, that shouldn't necessarily make you jump over the moon as there is a range where the flash memory operates optimally, so we tried it without the heatsink to see how it fared on the claims of 15% lower and it came in around 52C, so looks like their claims of the heatsink's functionality is working. Put that in long term use inside a case and those numbers should keep the flash in peak thermal range for functionality.

But at $139.99 you do have access to a decently quick PCIe 3.0 NVMe drive that will deliver consistently good performance and the added benefit, both aesthetically and functionally, of having an included heatsink. BUT, if your motherboard has it's own heatsink or you're going to have to remove it to fit under a graphics card, you might want to look at saving a few bucks on a different drive.

8.5
Wccftech Rating

A solid entry into the Gen 3.0 NVMe market with a great heatsink, but be wary it might be too tall in some instances.

Pros
  • Heatsink included
  • 5-year warranty
  • Solid performance
  • Runs cool
  • TUF Gaming Alliance certified
Cons
  • A bit pricey
  • The heatsink may interfere with GPU or other components

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