A Closer Look
One thing I love about this setup is that the cooler comes pre-installed on the drive, so it’s ready to plug and play. And there’s a factory seal sticker so that you know it hasn’t been tinkered with.
Down the side of the cooler, there’s a side plate with the Spatium branding and the MSI badge, and the design is pretty similar to what we see on their flagship motherboards and graphics card, so it should all look pretty slick together.
The heatpipes on this cooler are pretty significant, with three of them stacked and folded into a U-shape throughout the heatsink, much like you would see on the Frozr coolers MSI has used on several generations of graphics cards.
Of course, heat pipes are only part of the solution, and there is a thick bank of fins to help dissipate the heat. The only downside is it is quite large, so it’s going to stick out from your motherboard rather significantly.
No MSI Factory Seal sticker is going to stop me! With the drive removed, you can see the drive uses a flat section of the heat pipes, which then makes direct contact with the drive.
The drive looks great too, obviously, it’s a stand 2280 M.2 form factor so it’ll work in just about any major desktop motherboard. There are two chips on the bottom too.
On the main side, you’ll find two more chips, they’re 512GB each, the same as the ones on the bottom, giving us the 2TB total capacity.
There’s also the latest Phison E26 PCIe 5 x4 controller, and SK Hynix DRAM.
Installing the drive could have been easier, this cooler is bloody massive and came extremely close to the lower section of the VRM cooling on our motherboard and the rear I/O cover. This isn’t a problem, MSI says “It’s within spec” and it is, it does fit, but getting to that M.2 fitting screw or catch (depending on your motherboard) needs nimble fingers and some patience.
It overhangs the PCIe slot quite a bit too, but as you can see, that’s not a big problem as it clears our graphics card nicely. Now, onto the testing!
