5. 3600x & 3500x – Score Card, Performance Summary & TL;DR
Accessories: 4 out of 5
Lifetime warranty, actually useful software, and usual clamshell card holder. There really is not much to complain about on this side of things.
Read performance: 25 out 25
The read performance that CFAST 2.0 cards like these Lexar cards have to offer are simply amazing. You literally will have to have a high end Solid State Drive to keep up with either series. Put another way you will be hard pressed to notice a difference between the 3500 and 3600 series unless you own high performance solid state drives. We do, and we did; but even then both were impressive.
Write performance: 39 out of 40
While there is no denying that there is still some room for improvement, both of these new series offer noticeably better write performance than the 3400X – and that is indeed impressive considering the 3400X was a darn fast card. Now if only camera manufactures would get onboard so that more consumers could take advantage of all that speed.
Warranty: 9 out of 10
Just as with the all Professional series, the Lexar 3500X & 3600X Professional series come with a lifetime warranty that is backstopped by one of the largest NAND manufactures in the world: Micron. This means that the Lexar Professional lifetime warranty is indeed a true lifetime warranty and will be honored for your lifetime and not the cards! The only minor issue is RMA’ing one may mean shipping it to the States. If you have a Micron RMA depot in your country, then you can consider this card a perfect 10.
Value: 17 out of 20
Both of these new series may indeed cost more than the outgoing 3400X series, but both easily justify their increased expense. Mix in an equally good lifetime warranty, with good software and while the neither will be the great value of the 1066X series they both are still pretty darn good.
Final Score: 94 / 100
There is no denying that these two new series cost more than the 3400X we recently looked at; however, both series easily justify their extra cost through noticeably better performance. Honestly, for the average consumer either series would be a great choice, but if you are concerned with which model to stick in your new DSRL, the 3500X is the more optimal choice.
