The Intel 750 PCIe unsurprisingly makes use of a PCIe slot so you will need a minimum 4x slot spare on your motherboard with which to plug the unit into if you want optimal speed. The device will work in a smaller slot with less PCIe lanes but obviously there will be a performance impact to take into consideration. Obtusely, it can also be slot into a slot with more lanes available but will only utilise the 4 lanes specified.
The device takes all the power it needs from the socket and thus needs no additional power input. The card consumes 25w when in use while 3W are consumed in idle state. As with the P3700, the controller features power loss protection which is good to see.
To the rear we see the PCB is exposed which was a shame. 14 single die MLC NAND 16GB flash chips are found on the exterior of the PCB with a further 18x64GB quad-die (4x128GBit) MLC NAND flash chips hidden beneath that full length heatsink. All of the flash chips are manufactured by Micron using the 20nm process. Also hidden from view are five DDR3-1600 DRAM modules providing a total of 1.25GB for the controller - twice the amount used on the Intel P3700 drive.
Intel have chosen to provide the controller themselves rather than rely on an aftermarket solution which makes sense if (as we suspect) it's the same controller used on the enterprise P3700 SSD.
The 750 card is a single slot design and as such should fit most any system you decide to use it in, even an mATX motherboard. In terms of system requirements we believe the biggest restriction aside from an available PCIe 4x slot will be the operating system requirements. While there are work arounds available for Windows 7 (credit to techpowerup), the drive is clearly focussed on the present with Windows 8, 8.1 and Windows 10 fully supported. We managed to install the drive as a boot drive on all of these operating systems with ease (BIOS supported) but Windows 7 was more troublesome requiring a Windows 8 install and then re-configuring the boot manager and a registry tweak. So while booting to Windows 7 is possible, it is not without its problems.
The card does not have any active cooling, instead relying on passive solution utilising a variety of heatsinks to cool the controller and chips down. The card did get a little toasty when in constant use but with adequate case cooling we don't think this would be an issue to be concerned about.
All in all, the new Intel drive is very well specced. We were a little disappointed about the backwards compatibility however it is unlikely performance users are going to stick with older operating systems. We would have liked to have seen a black, instead of green PCB too or at least a full cover heatsink/backplate configuration. That said these are only minor issue for what is in effect a stunning product. The key however is of course performance so let's see how it stacks up against a crop of SSDs currently available on the market...
