Holy moly SSDs need serious cooling now

pcgamer.com:

I've probably looked at more motherboards just today than I have in the past three combined. That's because every manufacturer has brand new Z790 motherboards ready to show off ahead of a yet unannounced Intel processor generation (that's the Raptor Lake refresh, by the way). But one thing I've noticed across nearly every board I've seen today, be it from ASRock, Gigabyte, or MSI, is that they all are fitted with seriously beefy coolers on their PCIe 5.0 NVMe slots.

Some of these coolers are included on the motherboard, and even these integrated designs are looking beefed up with the coming generation of SSDs. But take a look at some of the coolers included or available as extras for PCIe 5.0 drives and things get out of hand pretty quickly.

Just look at the size of the cooler and fan loaded onto the MSI Spatium Pro PCIe 5.0 2TB Frozr+ drive. That drive is capable of a very impressive 14,520MB/s sequential read according to the benchmark results on display, and thanks to that cooler it runs 30 degrees Celsius cooler than it would have without (44 degrees Celsius was the max temperature I saw on the test machine), which is pretty darn good, but damn if it's not a chunky addition to any gaming PC. 

And without the cooler you're likely looking at a toasty drive.

Or how about the passive version of that cooler, which is even larger to make up for the lack of fan. There's two of them in the image I snapped above, but I've seen smaller heatsinks on a GTX 1050.

The more budget version of the drive comes with a decent-sized cooler, by PCIe 4.0 standards, and MSI touts the cooler-less versions as being better for an upgrade than a fresh install (i.e. where you already have a cooler in place).

MSI also had a new PC case with a row