Blazing speed or top value-for-money? Take your pick with these two great SSD deals

Every week, I hunt through the usual online retailers for the best gaming SSD deals around and it's been a bit disappointing to see how little prices have changed over the past nine months. There are still plenty of great deals to be found, though, but it really comes down to what you want from your SSD.

If you need the fastest possible speed then you'll be paying a premium for it. On the other hand, if you want value for money, then it'll be speed that you'll have to sacrifice. Most SSDs sit somewhere in between but sometimes compromise just won't do.

And if that's the case for you, then I have just the SSDs that fit either bill—blistering performance or the most bytes for your bucks, there's an ideal pick for either choice.

Crucial T700 | 1 TB | NVMe | PCIe 5.0 | 11,700 MB/s read | 9,500 MB/s write | $151.99$139.99 at Newegg (save $12)
If you absolutely must have the fastest possible SSD then you need to get a Gen5 model. Crucial's T700 is ridiculously quick, as we found when we tested a preview sample, but the high price and running temperatures spoil the picture somewhat. Probably best to wait for the next round of Gen5 SSDs before making the plunge.

Price check: Amazon $162.99 (w/ heatsink)

The very latest motherboards for AMD and Intel CPUs sport at least one PCIe 5.0 M.2 slot. Obviously to get the full performance benefit you need to install a PCIe 5.0 (aka Gen5) SSD but, unfortunately, the majority of them are still very expensive.

That's a little true of this Crucial T700 but at $140, it's the cheapest one I've seen in quite some time. It also happens to be an extremely fast SSD, as we discovered when we tested a preview sample of the drive.

However, it's worth noting that a Gen5 SSD won't make your games any faster and you'll not really notice much difference in how fast Windows boots, either. That's because all that raw speed is down to the interface and once you start reading/writing data from another drive or data source, the performance is going to be