Has SSD cooling gone too far, is PCIe 5.0 speed worth it?" These are questions to ponder as we stare at an SSD with a dedicated liquid cooler.

The drive in question is MSI's Spatium M580 PCIe 5.0 NVMe M.2 2 2TB Frozr Liquid, which comes with its own small water cooler, radiator, and blower fan. This is to deal with the extra heat generated when this PCIe 5.0 drive performs up to 14,000 MB/s read/12,000 MB/s write.

The compact radiator is certainly a bit cute, but the idea of an SSD requiring this much cooling is rather frightening.

MSI's line of Spatium coolers first caught my attention at Computex. These air-cooled SSDs are hard to pass up. But MSI upped the ante with its latest addition to its booth at CES 2024.

"This compact water pump is a surprisingly effective powerhouse despite its small size, seamlessly delivering uncompromised cooling capacity within its limited size," MSI said on its promotional signage for the event. These are words one would normally expect from a new graphics card shroud.

If you want to get flawless and consistent transfer performance from your PCIe 5.0 SSD, you need to think about how you cool it. We are confident that this little liquid-cooled drive will be good enough for long-time file transfer performance. For most PC gamers, however, a PCIe 4.0 drive and a normal-sized heatsink will suffice.

More of this sort of thing should be expected, however. The more silicon is pushed out, the more heat is generated. This will continue until something is found to completely replace silicon, but finding a suitable replacement for silicon will not be easy.

_____________________________________ PC Gamer's CES 2024 coverage is courtesy of Asus Republic of Gamers.