Amazon Basics have produced some great computer gear in their history – memorably, once selling a full-size mechanical keyboard for £23 that I reviewed and found surprisingly good value for money. Today though, it’s something different: an Amazon Basics branded Micro SD card in a 256GB capacity, selling for just £15.67 rather than its UK RRP of £26.99.
Here’s what I’ve learned about the card, and why I reckon it’s worth picking up if you’re in need for a memory card for your Steam Deck, Switch or whatever.
First and most importantly, Amazon has partnered with a well-known manufacturer to produce its branded memory cards. Just as it tapped the highly regarded Ergotron to produce its own-brand monitor arms, they went with Lexar owners Longsys to produce the cards – so unsurprisingly, they’re legit.
The card has received an A2 rating for its speed, indicating that you could run games or apps off of the card directly and get acceptable performance. The A2 rating specifically requires 4K IOPS random reads, 2K IOPS random writes and a sustained sequential write of 10MB/s. In terms of maximum speeds, the card is rated up to 100MB/s reads and 90MB/s writes, so it should be suitable for writing 4K 30fps video in case you’re using it in an mirrorless camera, action cam or drone.
In our investigations into the best Micro SD cards for Steam Deck, the Amazon Basics card didn’t come up in our testing, but we saw very narrow margins between memory cards of different specs and manufacturers, suggesting the Steam Deck isn’t bottlenecked by even distinctly average Micro SD card storage – it’s probably more of a CPU limitation than anything else. That means that the Amazon Basics cards should work perfectly here, and that goes double for the Switch where even very slow Micro SD cards work well.
In any case, I’ve got a match of Modern Warfare 2 (the 2022 one) queued up, so I’ll get back to it! Thanks for reading my deals this week, if indeed you did, and generally thanks for supporting RPS through clicking links in these sorts of deals articles. We do appreciate it. I’ll see you again next week for more deals, so have a good one!