Fast, furious, and flippin' hot, apparently.
I'm sometimes asked why we don't often recommend Gen 5 NVMe drives (although, to be fair, we do recommend one). Alright, I don't get asked it that often I guess, but the answer remains the same as it was when they first came out—they're very fast, but so are Gen 4 drives, at least for gaming.
More than that, they're pricey, again compared to Gen 4. And then there's the kicker—they also have a tendency to run very, very hot.
Team Group's Computex 2024 booth had some fresh examples of the speedy little drives, including a T-Force Pro SSD with a quoted 14,173 MB/s read and 12,757 write rate, apparently soon to be available in 8 TB configuration. I asked how much it might potentially cost, and one of the booth reps laughed knowingly, before shaking their head.
That'll be rather expensive then. Just a hunch. Anyway, speedy, pricey. Same old story, really. But what about the heat?
Well, Team Group does appear to have been iterating on cooler designs to beat the heat from Gen 5 drives, with some potential pre-production ideas on display. The problem is, none of them really get around the fact that to get the most out of a top spec Gen 5 drive, it still looks like you need a miniature tower block to ensure it keeps from throttling over extended use.
The best of these cooling concepts was a multi-heatsink configuration held together with magnets, making extra cooling capacity a more stackable, modular affair. It was quite satisfying to hold, and if I'm honest I'd quite like one as a desk toy—snapping the heatsinks together was good fun.
What I really can't get behind, however, is this DDR5 RAM cooler. While I was assured that it wasn't actually a requirement for cooling the DDR5 on display, and was more for machines with limited cooling capacity, attaching a small, adjustable hovercraft to the top of your RAM really feels like a stretch solution to a problem that shouldn't exist.
At first, I appreciated it for novelty value. The more I thought about the potential need for it though, the more it made me shake my head.
Fans, fans, and more fans. As speedy solid state hardware climbs ever further into the stratosphere of extreme performance, it's clear that despite some clever (and some less than clever) heat-busting designs, cooling solutions are still struggling to keep up.
Oh, and you can get T-Force Xtreem DDR5 desktop RAM in pink now. I wouldn't normally mention an existing product simply because it came in a new colour, but as a fan of all-black hardware I actually thought it looked rather fetching.
Looks like ice cream, doesn't it? I'm off to the shops...
