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c't Magazine Reviews the HighPoint R7608A
c't Magazine is a German computer magazine, published by the Heinz Heise publishing house. c't Magazine is the second most popular German-language computer magazine, boasting a sold circulation of 315,000 as of March 2011, with 241,000 subscriptions, making it the most subscribed computer magazine in Europe. It covers both hardware and software, primarily focusing on the Microsoft Windows platform, while also regularly featuring content on Linux and Apple. The magazine is renowned for its thorough and detailed coverage.
Review
An SSD with PCIe 5.0 is fast, eight together even faster. More than 50 GB/s can be achieved by the SSDs connected to a RAID on the PCIe plug-in card Rocket 7608A from Highpoint - but not on every mainboard.
For certain applications, even the speed of a high-performance PCIe 5.0 SSD may not suffice. While RAID 0 setups with two M.2 SSDs are feasible on many motherboards, adding three or more SSDs typically requires an add-on card. If the motherboard features a PCIe x16 slot that can split its lanes, a passive card suffices for up to four SSDs; otherwise, a PCIe switch is necessary.
The HighPoint Rocket 7608A is equipped with eight M.2 slots, each supporting PCIe 5.0 x4, managed via the Broadcom PEX89048 PCIe switch. The SSDs and switch are housed beneath a large heatsink with an integrated fan for cooling. During testing, eight SSDs with Phison E26 controllers were used, as these are the only drives validated by HighPoint for the card. Although not all SSDs were the latest generation, with some capping at 12 GB/s sequential speeds, they provided 16 TB of fast storage for the test.
HighPoint supplies a Windows software tool to configure the SSDs individually, in groups, or in RAID 0, 1, or 10 modes. Initial testing on an AMD-based Asus TUF Gaming X670E-Plus motherboard with a Ryzen 7 9700X achieved a total speed of only 28 GB/s. Switching to an Intel-based Asus ROG Strix Z790-E motherboard resolved this, delivering the expected performance of approximately 51 GB/s for parallel reads and 55.9 GB/s for simultaneous reads and writes, indicating some performance headroom. Writes alone reached 27 GB/s, while random access achieved 1.5 million IOPS for reads and 2.1 million IOPS for writes.
RAID 10 configuration slightly improved read speeds to 52 GB/s but reduced write speeds to 14 GB/s. Read IOPS increased to 2 million, but write IOPS dropped to 1.25 million.
Power consumption was measured at 20 watts idle and 66 watts under load. SMART software provided health details for individual SSDs, though UEFI BIOS functions for erasing SSDs were not supported. While no immediate use case for the card emerged, its extreme speed is likely suited for niche applications where cost—exceeding €2,200 for the card plus SSDs—is less of a concern. The Rocket 7608A achieves over 50 GB/s with RAID SSDs but requires compatible motherboards to reach its full potential.