HyperX launches microSD card line targeting gamers

Shawn Knight

Posts: 15,240   +192
Staff member
Bottom line: Nintendo's Switch features just 32GB of internal storage, not nearly enough for most gamers. Whether it's a HyperX card or one from another manufacturer, odds are, you're going to want expandable storage for your Switch.

Kingston Technology’s gaming division, HyperX, on Monday launched its new gaming microSD card line in North America.

Designed for mobile gamers that need additional storage, the HyperX Gaming microSD cards afford read speeds of 100MB/s and write speeds of 80MB/s. They’re offered in capacities of 64GB (part number HXSDC/64GB), 128GB (part number HXSDC/128GB) and 256GB (part number HXSDC/256GB) and target Nintendo Switch gamers as well as those that play on smartphones, tablets and other portable gaming devices.

The cards meet UHS-I, CL10, Speed Class (U3) and A1 performance requirements, the company notes. Additional specifications include:

  • Dimensions: 11mm x 15mm x 1mm
  • Format: exFAT (SDXC 64GB-256GB)
  • Operating Temperatures: -25°C to 85°C
  • Storage Temperatures: -40°C to 85°C Voltage: 3.3V

HyperX says the cards will be available via Amazon in the US and Canada. Pricing starts at $49.99 on the low end and tops out at $199.99 for the 256GB model. The product page on HyperX’s website doesn’t appear to be up yet, nor are the product pages on Amazon, although I suspect these will be up soon.

Cheaper options do exist if you’re not looking to spend as much. Over on Amazon, for example, I found this SanDisk Ultra 256GB microSD card for just $79.95.

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...is that any better than any of the much cheaper non-gamer branded ones that always seem to be on sale?
 
Those read and write speeds aren’t much better than Sandisks current ultra cards at all. So why are they charging more than twice as much? Am I missing something? Or is this another case of a tech company taking advantage of misinformed customers, like when they used to make ridiculously expensive HDMI cables.
 
...is that any better than any of the much cheaper non-gamer branded ones that always seem to be on sale?
If I were you, I would ask in a photography forum (r/ is always a good option), they are more hardcore than gamers when talking memories lol
As a photographer and geek, I can tell you that you can safely get the slower cards for cheeper and it wont make a bit of difference as there is nothing within the realm of portable that can max out the current speeds. My D850 Nikon can only max out the speed on my XQD card when shooting 9 frames of 14 bit raw photos with jpg fine enabled every second! . Each raw photo is about 100mb and the jps are about 30megs, so roughly 1.17GB a second of data created. Even filming of crappy 4k with your phone you will never create such a data stream.
 
If I were you, I would ask in a photography forum (r/ is always a good option), they are more hardcore than gamers when talking memories lol
I agree with you but generally photographers focus (ahem) on the write speed of a card so they can take as many photos as possible in quick succession without waiting for the memory card to catch up. Whereas gamers should be more interested in the read speed as most gamers won’t have a fast enough internet connection to saturate the write speed of even cheaper SD cards but the read speed will go some way of defining the loading times of a game. Photography forums are clearly going to offer a better insight though. Still, who buys a switch and then spends 2/3 of the cost of the console on a memory card so they can knock a few seconds off their loading times? This whole thing smells a bit, I don’t own a switch, does it even have particularly tiresome loading times?
 
If I were you, I would ask in a photography forum (r/ is always a good option), they are more hardcore than gamers when talking memories lol
I agree with you but generally photographers focus (ahem) on the write speed of a card so they can take as many photos as possible in quick succession without waiting for the memory card to catch up. Whereas gamers should be more interested in the read speed as most gamers won’t have a fast enough internet connection to saturate the write speed of even cheaper SD cards but the read speed will go some way of defining the loading times of a game.
Most microsd cards have "Advertised" read and write speeds only about 10mb/s apart. In real world tests most micro and sd cards tend to have the same average read and write speeds unless your buying the Chinese knock offs in which case its dealers choice on how they will perform.
 
...is that any better than any of the much cheaper non-gamer branded ones that always seem to be on sale?
If I were you, I would ask in a photography forum (r/ is always a good option), they are more hardcore than gamers when talking memories lol
As a photographer and geek, I can tell you that you can safely get the slower cards for cheeper and it wont make a bit of difference as there is nothing within the realm of portable that can max out the current speeds. My D850 Nikon can only max out the speed on my XQD card when shooting 9 frames of 14 bit raw photos with jpg fine enabled every second! . Each raw photo is about 100mb and the jps are about 30megs, so roughly 1.17GB a second of data created. Even filming of crappy 4k with your phone you will never create such a data stream.

Your XQD / D850 will bottleneck well before 9fps since the fastest XQD cards benchmark at under 300MB/s. But it's hard to imagine any real-world scenario where that would be a problem.
 
The article talks about HyperX's UHS-I U3 cards and then links to a Sandisk U1 card on Amazon. That's comparing apples to oranges.

Sandisk's UHS-I U3 line is the Extreme Pro, and those aren't exactly cheap either. There's also UHS-II U3, which costs even more. A lot of confusion around these standards, because they're poorly implemented.

Whether the faster standards are worth the price is an entirely different conversation...

Just for comparison:

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/prod...sdxpk_128g_ancin_extremepro_uhs_ii_128gb.html
 
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