14 DAY TRIAL // The Assassin's Creed franchise has grown swiftly since the launch of the first game a few years ago, and it's also been revitalizing people's interest in history on the side. The latest installment is going to be a bit less historically accurate, but it's bound to sell well anyway, and Samsung wants to capitalize on that.
The company has announced that if you buy the Samsung U28D590D (UD590) monitor or the Samsung 850 PRO solid state drive (SSD), you'll get the game for free.
This is because of a deal that Samsung made with Ubisoft. Samsung gets to ride the coattails of the game franchise's popularity, and Ubisoft gets an in with customers early on.
We'll be looking at the monitor separately, later. For now, let's see what the solid state drive has to offer us.
The Samsung 850 Pro SSD
This actually isn't a new device. The drive was released back in July and made the headlines thanks to the 3D V-Nand technology.
3D V-Nand, or vertical NAND, uses stacked NAND chips in order to provide a larger storage capacity with no impact on performance, which is about as good as you can find already.
With capacities of 256 GB, 512 GB and 1 TB, the SSDs can read data at 550 MB/s on a good day, and write it at 520 MB/s. The real life performance probably won't go that high for the most part, but it's good to know that large files like movies and game data kits will be moved quickly during an installation process.
Samsung did indicate what the real life expectations should be. Games will load twice as fast as on the best HDD, and that's mostly because software can't leverage the sheer speed of NAND Flash and its controllers fully yet.
Besides that, the solid state drive will enable the normal benefits for a computer: near instantaneous boot of the OS, even faster launching of applications (browsers, media players, etc.). You'll have to install the OS right on it though, for that to happen, and maybe the game itself as well, just to be sure.
Availability and pricing
Since the SSD line has been around for a while, you should find it on pretty much any retailer website, bearing a price of 199 / €146 to $699 / €513. BestBuy, Amazon, Microcenter, Tiger Direct, Fry's and NewEgg are on the list. There should also be a 128 GB Samsung 850 Pro SSD for $130 / €95, but that one won't include the game bundle, so it doesn't count.