Akasa SSD heatsink: really cheap and efficient solution

Conclusion

Simple and optimally milled aluminum plate, sounds like a good basis for some SSD heatsink with the potential to achieve high efficiency at low cost. Fast, easy installation and great compatibility with graphics cards is also quite important, plus the look is not bad. Akasa probably wanted to create an ideal compromise of all the key elements. This could easily became a bestseller because the price is just 4 euros.

Details

The contact area of the heatsink is 71 x 21.5 mm and the height is 6 mm, which is 1 mm more than the excellent EKWB EK-M2. Akasa has less ribs, but they are thicker. There’s no backplate included.

The installation system is the simplest possible, it uses a self-adhesive thermalpad. Its thickness is only 0.3 mm, which may or may not cause problems with SSDs with different controller and memory height. The controller of the tested OCZ RD400 is 0.2mm smaller, but it doesn’t cause any trouble. If you use just enough pressure (during the installantion) on the spot with the gap, the PCB will adapt.

In the photo, you can see that although the memory chips are higher, the thermalpad touches the entire surface of the controller. The only place uncovered was the casing of the buffer LPDDR3 (notice the light near the connector). However, it doesn‘t heat that much and there’s no real need to cool it unless you use a drive with a very powerful controller.

SSDs with Akasa heatsink may collide with graphics cards in some cases, but only in very rare situations. For example, when the M.2 connector is too far from the motherboard and the graphics card has a wide cooler. Before you buy, we recommend to make sure that measures in your rig are OK. There are, of course, options to install your SSD above or away from the graphics card (like with Crosshair VI Hero), but the most desirable conditions for your drive would be just under the graphics card fans, assuming they turn at least a little. In passive mode, it would make things worse.

Simple and optimally milled aluminum plate, sounds like a good basis for some SSD heatsink with the potential to achieve high efficiency at low cost. Fast, easy installation and great compatibility with graphics cards is also quite important, plus the look is not bad. Akasa probably wanted to create an ideal compromise of all the key elements. This could easily became a bestseller because the price is just 4 euros.

Test procedures

We started with 900 seconds in idle, then continued with 900 seconds of linear reading of 8MB blocks in Aida64 (with an average speed of 2GB/s). The SSD we used was OCZ RD400 with installed OS.

We tested with two configurations of thermalpads. The first one was with the original thickness of 0.3 mm, and the second one with the 1mm Arctic. We used something thicker to make it possible to place the 0.8mm thick thermocouple sensor between the SSD and the heatsink.

The sensor of the first thermocouple was centered on the controller, which is the area where was the most intense heating. The second thermocouple was attached to the memory that is closer to the controller (the “warmer“ one). We monitored the temperatures with the properly calibrated UNI-T UT325 thermometer.

All tests were carried out in our wind tunnel with four NF-A12S PWM fans (2 – intake, 2 –outtake) regulated to approximately 550 rpm. The SSD was mounted in the PCIe adapter and it was in a vertical position. We also took some interactive thermal images of the heatsink, and we put the highest and average values to the charts. We let the SSD cool down before each test.

Simple and optimally milled aluminum plate, sounds like a good basis for some SSD heatsink with the potential to achieve high efficiency at low cost. Fast, easy installation and great compatibility with graphics cards is also quite important, plus the look is not bad. Akasa probably wanted to create an ideal compromise of all the key elements. This could easily became a bestseller because the price is just 4 euros.

Results: cooling of the controller and memory

Simple and optimally milled aluminum plate, sounds like a good basis for some SSD heatsink with the potential to achieve high efficiency at low cost. Fast, easy installation and great compatibility with graphics cards is also quite important, plus the look is not bad. Akasa probably wanted to create an ideal compromise of all the key elements. This could easily became a bestseller because the price is just 4 euros.

Heatsink temperatures

Thermal images: Stock thermalpad (left), 1mm Arctic (right)

Simple and optimally milled aluminum plate, sounds like a good basis for some SSD heatsink with the potential to achieve high efficiency at low cost. Fast, easy installation and great compatibility with graphics cards is also quite important, plus the look is not bad. Akasa probably wanted to create an ideal compromise of all the key elements. This could easily became a bestseller because the price is just 4 euros.

Conclusion

Akasa heatsink is an excellent product that would fit any SSD PCIe. Compared to the superior EKWB, there are some drawbacks, mostly because of attributes of the stock thermalpad. The efficiency nicely increased with the 1mm Arctic. However, the price is so attractive that there’s no reason to dwell on details. We can imagine a bit better shape of the heatsink, but we also understand that the manufacturer wanted to make something that is also visually appealing and to show off their logo somewhere.

What matters is that that the heatsink can reduce the temperature of your SSD by 20 – 30 ºC, the installation is super easy, and it’s available in every decent shop. It’s simply a great deal for the money. If you know about some other cheap solution for SSD cooling, leave us a comment and we’ll gladly give it a closer look.

For its cooling efficiency and price, we decided to give Akasa SSD heatsink our award “Go for it!“.

If you would like to give us a tip for a review, feel free to do so in the comment section. We will be grateful for any feedback!

• Contents
• Details
• Test procedures
• Results: cooling of the controller and memory
• Heatsink temperatures
• Conclusion