Our 'best cheap PCIe 4.0 SSD for gaming' pick is 60% off at Amazon UK
£44 is an incredible price for a 1TB drive of this speed.
The Crucial P3 Plus is an SSD that we recommend as one of the best for gaming, and today it's even cheaper than usual - with a price drop on Amazon UK bringing it to £43.79, nearly 60% off RRP and a solid £17 reduction from its price back in April. This makes it an incredible time to upgrade your system with super-fast PCIe 4.0 storage.
Let's get the essential information out of the way first. The P3 Plus is a TLC drive that uses a DRAM-less design, meaning it's somewhere between QLC DRAM-less drives at the very cheapest end of the market and TLC DRAM drives at the top end in terms of price, performance and longevity. It's well-balanced, in other words, with great performance in real-world testing that only falls down in extended write scenarios - which are relatively few and far between outside of content creation workloads like 4K video editing.
For gaming, this is as fast a drive as you're likely to benefit from, with our testing showing impressive loading times - 7.3 seconds to load Shadow of the Tomb Raider versus 10.4 seconds for our previous pick in the budget category, the WD SN750 SE.
With its PCIe 4.0 connection, the P3 Plus is best used in relatively recent motherboards and laptops that support the 4.0 standard, but you'll stil see solid performance in PCIe 3.0 machines with the promise of better performance available down the road if you haven't made a PC upgrade recently. The P3 Plus tops out at 5000MB/s reads and 4200MB/s writes, which puts it around three-quarters of the speed of the very fastest PCIe 4.0 drives, while random reads and writes are also respectable at 680K IOPS and 850K IOPS respectively - with the very best drives managing in the 1000K to 1500K IOPS range.
Overall then, it's an excellent drive for the money, so well worth considering for your next PC upgrade!