Kingston NV3 1TB M.2 2280 NVMe SSD | PCIe 4.0 Gen 4x4 | Up to 6000 MB/s | SNV3S/1000G

Across the reviewers we read, the Kingston NV3 is the consensus budget Gen4 NVMe pick when price-per-gigabyte is the priority. tomshardware.com calls it 'a marked improvement on the NV2 and a reasonably good budget SSD,' noting power efficiency and low operating temperatures alongside honest performance caveats. ssd-tester.com's benchmarks confirm advertised speeds in burst workloads, and high-trust r/buildapc threads include long-term owners running it as both an OS drive and a gaming/storage drive without complaints.

The critical disagreement comes from r/hardware and r/NewMaxx: the NV3 ships with 'variable hardware' — Kingston has used multiple controller and NAND combinations under the same SKU — and at least some variants exhibit a QLC fold state where sustained write speeds collapse to roughly 250 MB/s once the SLC cache fills. That is the standard budget-drive trade-off, but it is louder here than with TLC alternatives like the WD SN7100. r/PHbuildapc commenters citing techpowerup.com still rate it favorably for the price tier.

The honest read: for a gaming or general-use drive where workloads are read-heavy and writes are bursty, the NV3 delivers Gen4 speeds for budget-tier money. For sustained heavy writes — video editing, large dataset moves — a TLC drive like the WD SN7100 or Crucial P310 is the safer pick.