Over the past decade, we have been paying close attention to MSI. In that time, we have seen them grow from mainly a motherboard and video card-centric company into the multi-marketplace juggernaut they are today. A juggernaut with everything from laptops to storage not only offered but engineered in such a way that brands them as being designed the ‘MSI Way’. That is to say that, an innovative take on what would be best for consumers and their needs. Sometimes this means overall value (e.g. Pro motherboard series), sometimes performance (e.g. Suprim video cards). Sometimes it means offering a product that reliably works in the real world. The best example of the latter is their newly released M570 Spatium Pro series of PCIe 5.0 M.2 Solid State Drives. A series that promises to reliably work no matter how poorly built a desktop system is, and no matter how hard you push the drive.
What this means is MSI has figuratively taken a look at the PCIe 5.0 market, then taken a look at the M.2 specification and gone ‘Yeah. No. That is not good enough for a MSI branded SSD’. We say this as the main claim to fame of the SPATIUM M570 PRO series is not its controller (Phison E26). It is not its NAND (Micron’s cutting edge 232-layer RG NAND). It is not the excellent 5-year / 1,400 TBW (2TB variant) warranty. It is not even the fact that they, similar to Crucial and their T700 series, have eschewed limiting the overall/board TDP all that much (MSI have set it to 11.5 watts). No. It is the fact that MSI have actually designed a cooling solution that can reliably handle the heat said combination creates.
To do what others have not done MSI have thrown out any and all PCI-SIG z-height standards and instead have taken their excellent Frozr cooling philosophy and applied it to the lowly M.2 SSD form-factor. The end result is a cooling tower solution that brings new meaning to the word ‘overkill’. So much that only aftermarket options like the ThermalRight TR-09 Pro can even hope to come close to matching its cooling potential. However, unlike aftermarket solutions that rely on off the shelf ‘round’ heatpipes, MSI has opted to also use their Core-Pipe technology. This squaring of the heat pipes allow for closer spacing of said heatpipes, thus allowing the SPATIUM M570 PRO the luxury of including not one, not two, but three 6mm heatpipes instead of the usual 3x4mm or 2x6mm ‘pipe configuration. Furthermore, this closer spacing and flattening of the ‘bottom’ of the pipes allows this cooling solution to be a Heatpipe Direct Touch design with said ‘pipes in direct contact with the SSD. The end result of all this innovative engineering is the new M570 Pro promises to be so capable that even PC cases with terrible internal air flow should offer enough to keep the E26 from overheating / thermal-limiting… and crashing the system in a ‘scram’ like / thermal overload event.
As such there is little room for doubt on the performance side of things… as MSI have indeed spec’ed out a known winning combination of components and power envelop. No, the real question is simple. Is the asking price of 299USD (for the 2TB variant we will be reviewing today) an insanely good or insanely bad price point for this series? The answer to which will mostly boil down to how good/bad the included cooling solution really is. After all, a ThermalRight TR-09 Pro can be found for about 20USD, and a nekkid 2TB Crucial T700 costs about $270. While that is only ~10 USD in the difference… that it is a known good combination. A combination that, like many, we personally have settled on for performance builds as it is a fairly consistent performer with known build issues. If such an existing combination is ‘good enough’ (let alone better) when compared against a slightly higher priced M570 Pro… well… MSI is going to have an uphill battle to say the least. “Cool” looking and ‘cool’ sounding custom cooling solution or not. So, let’s find out.
