Patriot’s Viper Gaming brand has been steadily impressing us in recent years with a string of high-performance SSDs and RAM options that also hit that price-to-performance sweet spot. Its latest release is slightly different; the new Viper Gaming Series V30 A2 is a microSD card designed for portable gaming handhelds like Steam Deck and Nintendo Switch.
microSD storage is the easiest way to expand the storage capabilities of a gaming handheld. All you need to do is put a microSD card into the relevant slot and immediately double or triple the available room to store games, media files, screenshots, and video recordings. The only problem is no two microSD cards are the same, and everything from speed to overall reliability can vary wildly from product to product.
The Viper Gaming Series V30 A2 microSD card sports some impressive specs as a gaming-focused product. It’s built with U3, Class 10, A2, V30, and UHS-I technology standards, offering read speeds of up to 100MB/s and write speeds of up to 90MB/s.
This is enough bandwidth to support high-quality 1080p and 4K recording directly to the card, making it suitable for a range of devices beyond the gaming focus of the Nintendo Switch, Steam Deck, and ROG Ally. It also meets the A2 standard for application performance, which means you’ve got random read/write speeds of up to 4000/2000 IOPS.
The Viper Gaming Series V30 A2 microSD card will be available in capacities from 128GB to 1TB. The product page is live, so we should start seeing this pop-up at retail stores soon.