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It's important to note that Crucial explicitly states that a heatsink or some form of cooling is required. Running it without a heatsink effectively voids the warranty and could result in a damaged drive. Don't buy a Gen5 drive and use it without a heatsink, in other words. (Testing the T700 in our Asus board with the motherboard heatspreader results in effectively identical performance to Crucial's own cooler, incidentally. YMMV depending on your particular mobo, heatspreader, and case configuration, naturally.) edzieba said:It would be illuminating to test without a heatsink anyway. The current drive only starts to throttle after 0.2-0.25 TB continuous writes, so based on testing of previous drives without heatsinks, it's quite likely the only effect from operating this drive without a heatsink would be reducing that threshold to 'only' 100 GB or so. I would expect any testing that does not involve throwing around continuous hundreds of GB of data would not see any significant (or any) performance impact from removing the cosmetic greebly.If you're doing stuff that doesn't throttle, you probably also don't need to buy a Gen5 SSD. I mean, PS5 doesn't support Gen5 anyway, so there's literally zero performance benefit. Anyway, the nature of our SSD benchmarks is that a lot of the tests are of short enough duration that they won't hit the throttling mark. The problem is stuff like CrystalDiskMark that takes quite a bit longer to run and will thus start to throttle hard on later tests. Which results are "valid"? If we take the maximum performance measured in a given test, we can make it look like having a heatsink doesn't matter.
Non-heatsink versions of the Crucial T700 must be installed with a motherboard or alternate heatsink to achieve optimal performance.Nice stuff. With current-gen software, it may not seem worth it to get it for. But the technical possibility to load 64 GB into RAM in about 5 seconds (and if needed, reload), that's that. And e.g. both RTX 4090 and RX 7900 XTX have 24 GB of VRAM. So it is not like there would be nothing to load the data to. Note that the WD SN850X is a PCIe 4.0 drive included for comparison. It’s among the fastest 4.0 SSDs we’ve tested and was re-tested on our latest test bed. (See the “How we test” section at the end of this article.) This SSD is not intended to be used without a heatsink, such as in a laptop or PlayStation 5.It would be illuminating to test without a heatsink anyway. The current drive only starts to throttle after 0.2-0.25 TB continuous writes, so based on testing of previous drives without heatsinks, it's quite likely the only effect from operating this drive without a heatsink would be reducing that threshold to 'only' 100 GB or so. I would expect any testing that does not involve throwing around continuous hundreds of GB of data would not see any significant (or any) performance impact from removing the cosmetic greebly.
Since 2004, I have worked on PCMag’s hardware team, covering at various times printers, scanners, projectors, storage, and monitors. I currently focus my testing efforts on 3D printers, pro and productivity displays, and drives and SSDs of all sorts. Compared to Gen5 SSD performance without DirectStorage, based on internal test results with supported GPU that uses GPU decompression. The T700 shaved a full 40 seconds off the Gigabyte PCIe 5’s 450GB write time. That’s bookin’. Shorter bars are better. Whether in particular video game devs will make full use of it, such as to depict e.g. cities to not look like Stalinist Moscow (that is using one type of texture, which gets reused on various walls, and therefore doesn't need to load much when such a texture fills half the screen, with three types of balconies reused to make it look not as monotone) - that isn't clear of course. But the option is there, including moving towards 8K, and not using artificial loading screens, such as an elevator ride between 2 areas as the only option to move between these two areas.ATTO Disk Benchmark showcases data transfer performance by reading and writing data in chunks of increasing sizes from 512 bytes to 64 MB. In ATTO, the T700 performed well, too, but there were instances where the P5 Plus outperformed it. Specifically, the 512B and 1KB write tests. In repeated tests, I found the T700 lagging behind in some of the smaller data size write tests. Each test is performed on a newly formatted and TRIM’d drive so the results are optimal. Note that as any drive fills up, performance will decrease due to less NAND for secondary caching, and other factors.
The PCMark 10 Overall Storage benchmark measures a drive's speed in performing a variety of routine tasks such as launching Windows, loading games and creative apps, and copying both small and large files. The Crucial T700 edged the Aorus 10000 with a new PC Labs high score, handily beating our PCIe 4.0 comparison drives. The T700 is not the first PCIe 5.0 SSD on the market, as the Inland TD510 has been out for a while. The T700 is also not the first to be announced by a big brand name, as we can see with the Corsair MP700. However, the T700 is the fastest implementation of the E26, as it can reach up to 12.4 GBps in sequential read workloads thanks to its speedier flash with an I/O speed of 2000 MT/s. This is in contrast to the 1600 MT/s flash used in the earlier E26 SSDs, limiting them to around 10 GBps. The E26 controller supports up to 2400 MT/s flash, which would put a cap of around 15 GBps. But for now, the T700 is the fastest around. While gaming, both SSDs ran around 66-68 degrees Celsius, s gaming performance was unaffected. Overall, I noticed that having this dual-SSD setup raised my motherboard temperature reading by 2-3 degrees Celsius. The T700 is slated to be the first of a new set of faster PCIe 5.0 SSDs that offer even better performance than what we saw with the initial PCIe 5.0 SSD we covered in our Phison E26 SSD controller preview. The T700 uses the Phison E26 SSD controller, a robust design used in several other 5.0 SSDs, paired with speedy 232-Layer TLC flash, thus creating the fastest SSD we’ve ever tested in our labs. Impressively, it delivers this level of performance with passive cooling thanks to its well-designed heatsink, but if you remove the heatsink the SSD will also work well in motherboards with proper M.2 heatsink coverage.Typical I/O performance as measured using CrystalDiskMark® with a queue depth of 512 and write cache enabled. Windows 11 Core isolation disabled for performance measurement. Fresh out-of-box (FOB) state is assumed. For performance measurement purposes, the SSD may be restored to FOB state using the secure erase command. System variations will affect measured results. While the Gen 5 SSDs are almost 7 months late they have merit for some desktop applications. They will not offer any practical advantage over PCIe 3 or 4 unless you are moving a lot of data at once. Internal drive tests currently utilize Windows 11 (22H2) 64-bit running on an X790 (PCIe 5.0) motherboard/i5-12400 CPU combo with two Kingston Fury 32GB DDR5 modules (64GB of memory total). Intel integrated graphics are used. The 48GB transfer tests utilize an ImDisk RAM disk taking up 58GB of the 64GB total memory. The 450GB file is transferred from a Samsung 990 Pro 2TB, which also contains the operating system. The T700 is a PCIe Gen 5.0 x4 NVMe M.2 SSD, rated for up to 12,400 MB/s in sequential read speeds, and up to 11,800 MB/s in sequential write speeds, as well as random read speeds and write speeds of up to 1,500K. It's a double-sided 2280 M.2 drive featuring Phison's bleeding-edge E26 controller, 4GB of LPDDR4 memory, and Microsoft DirectStorage API. Because of the slightly insane numbers popping up, the test experience with the T700 was just a general hoot. So much so that I also installed a couple of operating systems on it, and they felt snappier. Not a huge difference, but noticeable. Is the Crucial T700 worth it?
The 232-Layer Micron TLC (B58R) flash takes up the mantle from Micron’s very successful 176-Layer TLC (B47R). Micron has gone from four planes to six and has made other improvements that make multi-planar operations faster for superior internal parallelization. The move to 1Tb (128GB) dies over 512Gb (64GB) is also an important consideration for capacity: bigger dies, more storage. The T700 is absolutely the current king of the hill, and it’s not even a particularly close contest. If you have the required PCIe 5.0 M.2 slot, it’s the NVMe SSD you want—assuming you have the required monetary wherewithal to pay for the privilege.Crucial T700’s 48GB transfers showed great improvement in the real world, unlike the Gigabyte. Shorter bars are better. Gamer Network Limited, Gateway House, 28 The Quadrant, Richmond, Surrey, TW9 1DN, United Kingdom, registered under company number 03882481. Crucial’s T700 shattered all our benchmark and real world records, and did so by a rather wide margin. If your system features a PCIe 5.0 M.2 slot, this SSD will take your storage performance to another level. The Crucial T700 sample we have in the labs today is unquestionably the fastest consumer SSD in the world, at least for now, delivering up to a blistering 12.4 GB/s of sequential throughput and 1.5 million random IOPS over the PCIe 5.0 interface. That's 70% faster than today's highest-end PCIe 4.0 SSDs, and 20% faster than the current crop of PCIe 5.0 drives.
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