Patriot Viper VPR100 Overview
The Patriot Viper VPR100 comes with the heatsink pre-installed, so you have this very nice drive with a smaller heatsink on it. This heatsink has the Viper logo in the center and two rows of white diffusers for the RGB lighting.
The drive itself is in the M.2 2280 form factor so it is 80mm long. The heatsink is not all that tall, but should do a good job at keeping the drive nice and cool.
Flipping the VRP100 over we can get a better look at the drive. One thing that really sticks out to me is the blue PCB. I know that you really won’t be able to see it, but I wish Patriot would have gone with black here. The drive is only held on to the heatsink by two pieces of thermal adhesive. This is actually pretty standard when it comes to M.2 heatsinks. The interesting thing when we take the heatsink off is that there are actually no RGB LEDs on the heatsink at all. What Patriot has done is hard-wire the RGB LEDs on to the PCB of the drive itself. This allows you to control the RGB LEDs without any wires.
With the drive fully removed from the heatsink we can get a better look at the components. We have the Phison PS5012-E12 controller, Toshiba 3D TLC NAND, and Sk Hynix cache chips.
