Two heatsinks, a heatpipe and a fan; the new ElecGear SSD cooler

Active M.2 SSD cooler added to ElecGear offer

More complex, tall coolers for SSD always attract attention. However, their fin area tends to be significantly oversized, at least for current semiconductor storage models. No extremes are needed for cooling ten watts at most. However, higher cooling performance might be warranted later, for PCI Express 5.0 SSDs. From this perspective, the ElecGear active cooler is a rather timeless novelty.

SSD cooling is often given more importance than is appropriate. It’s good to have at least some sort of a cooler on a powerful SSD, but there’s no point in overdoing it. Especially in desktops with good air circulation. High-performance NVMe SSDs with PCI Express 4.0 support do reach 8-10 watts, but that’s only at peak – during sequential transfers. However, these never last long at such performance, but when they do last longer, it’s only after the pSLC buffer is exhausted, when lower performance goes hand in hand with lower power draw (and thus lower cooling requirements).

Anyway, most of the time you don’t push the SSD to the max and the power draw is minimal, usually around one watt in games, and when the power draw spikes, it’s only for a few milliseconds, which the SSD can handle even without a cooler. We will prospectively address this topic in more detail in our tests, where we will continuously simulate load stages where we will track temperatures with and without a cooler. We won’t elaborate more on this in this preview of the new ElecGear cooler though. Still, even within this article we wanted to point out that its design will initially have a much higher thermal performance than currently makes sense.

If you thought the Cryorig Frostbite design was already over the top, the manufacturer has gone even further in this case. The ElecGear M11 SSD cooler also has two heatsinks to which the heat is evenly distributed by a heatpipe, but there’s also a small 30-millimeter RaidSonic fan with an airflow of up to 5.37 m3/h, the level of static pressure is not mentioned.

The fan is said to be “silent”, although it reaches speeds of up to around 9300 rpm at maximum. But hopefully well controllable, and the silent part is meant for some sort of “typical” operation model. It’s possible that the cooler will only switch to active mode in critical situations and will otherwise operate passively (similarly to how fans tend to work as part of coolers on AMD X570 chipsets), so it might not be that much of a scarecrow after all. The fan connects with a standard 4-pin connector and supports pulse-width modulation (PWM) for control.

The ElecGear M11 SSD is 83mm in height, but the heatpipe in the bottom heatsink is mounted so that it can be rotated 145 degrees. This way, one could also avoid the expansion card that is near the M.2 slot used. Two thermal pads are also included, which are supposed to have a thermal conductivity of 4.8 W/mk. The heat reduction with this cooler is promised to be 12-25 °C. This wide variance obviously takes into account the different nature of the operating environment, but also the model of the SSD used (with more power-efficient SSDs, the temperature difference with and without the cooler will naturally be smaller). The cooler can already be purchased for example on Amazon for about 25 euros plus shipping.

English translation and edit by Jozef Dudáš


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