Team Group showed me some blazingly fast Gen 5 SSDs, pink DDR5, and a host of wacky cooling solutions to keep it all in check
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.
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