Generally speaking, there are flashy attention getting shipping containers. There are ultra-conservative looking shipping containers. There are good shipping containers, and there are bad shipping boxes that products haphazardly come in. If one was to make an X-Y grid of these possibilities we would place the MSI SPATIUM M570 PRO series firmly in the good section and have edging more towards the conservative end of the spectrum. That is to say it is not garish, but not so hard-core conservatively designed as to be seen as ‘boring’ or ‘bland’ by some. Instead, it is a good box that tells you precisely what is housed inside and yet does so in a manner that belies the shear size of if this M.2 device.
That is both a good and a bad thing. In theory having a (relatively) gigantic box would help unenlightened (aka novice) buyers instantly grasp the concept of how big this M.2 SSD is… but on the other that would just make it more expensive to ship and to find room to store the box for the 5-year warranty period. As such this box is about the same as what Crucial and Seagate use for their PCIe 5.0 generation SSDs. That is to say, moderately large but no where near as big as you would think a mega-sized M.2 drive ‘should’ be shipped in.
On the positive side, the use of multiple layers on internal protection makes this a box that you could easily ship all the way around the world and have little fears of it being damaged in transit. As such, we really like this box but do wish MSI had further highlighted the over-sized dimensions of the SPATIUM M570 PRO series… as oof it may come as a shock if you are not expecting it.
To be precise when you do open up the ye olde shipping container you will be greeted with a 24mm wide, 95mm long, 72mm tall M.2 drive. Those dimensions firmly place this in the ‘beefy’ end of the spectrum. However, it also weighs in at about five freakin’ ounces. For a M.2 SSD. A form-factor known for both its light-weight (typically 1oz or so for denude models) and small foot-print (typically… 22mm wide by 80mm long by single digit z-height numbers).
To put this insanely over-sized model in comparison we went to our spare parts bin and pulled first a ThermalRight HR10… a model that has replace the “Acidalie” type after market cooling solution of choice for M.2 performance builds. As you can see in the above photo the MSI SPATIUM M570 PRO series dwarfs it.
Swapping the ’10 for a HR-09 Pro one can see that, thankfully, the MSI SPATIUM M570 PRO series will not introduce any additional build issues when it comes to the overall footprint… as both are basically the same size in the X, Y and Z axis. With that said, MSI has done a much… much better job at fully utilizing the space such dimensions afford said drive.
This segues nicely into exactly what MSI has done when they created this custom cooling solution. Let us start with the usual ‘weak link’ in any M.2 cooler. Namely, the cooling fin-array. Usually when dealing with M.2 cooling solutions the design team relies more on the fact that few will consistently push their drive hard and as such the heatsink is more accurately described as a heat spread one where the thermal mass of it allows the drive to run cool (enough) and said mass have ‘good enough’ passive heat transfer that once the heat event(s) pass that it can overtime radiate the heat into the case.
Acidalie were one of the first to buck this trend by offering an actually cooling ‘tower’ that took a lot of its design queues from CPU cooling solutions. ThermalRight then advanced that cooling efficiency theme via using an actual fin array (that is actually optimized for active cooling)… and MSI has taken it to its logical conclusion by making it both efficient enough to be run in passive mode, and yet also large enough that if one so chooses you could easily mount a 60mm fan to the fin array and get extreme performance. Out of a M.2 fin array. This may not matter much right now as 12 watts is about all a M.2 cooler has to contend with… but if one was to stick a Noctua 60mm to this fin array even modern CPUs could be effectively cooled. Thus, bringing new meaning to the word ‘future proofing’.
Before moving on let’s get out ye olde Mit’ Mic’ and go over precisely how much surface area the MSI SPATIUM M570 PRO series has to work with. Firstly, there are a grand total of 36 fins that have been firmly folded (but sadly not soldered) around the heatpipes. Each of these aluminum fins is about 69.3mm tall, 24mm wide and the entirety of the fin array stack is 69.3mm by 53mm by 24mm.
Giving each fin an impressive 1,663.2 square millimeters of cooling surface and the entirety of the fin stack about 59,875mm2 of surface area. Thus, the justification for saying this cooler could handle an Intel or AMD Mobile processor with aplomb.
