Chinese PC components maker JiuShark (via SI-129 (opens in new tab)) has launched a new M.2 heatsink with active cooling, called the JuiShark M.2 Three (opens in new tab). The JuiShark M.2 Three’s appearance could easily be mistaken for a modern CPU cooler, adopting the popular tower-style form factor. Over recent months we have seen increasingly elaborate and powerful M.2 cooling solutions launched to cool the best SSDs. The trend appears to be in preparation for M.2 drives getting hotter, with the introduction of super-fast PCIe 5.0 capable M.2 SSDs that’ll accompany AMD’s Ryzen 7000 processors.
JuiShark’s marketing spiel is that, as M.2 drives get faster, it is all the more important to keep them sufficiently cool for the sake of performance and data integrity – or something along those lines – as we had to rely on machine translation of the official blurb.
The renders show the M.2 Three without much else in the frame for reference. However, it isn’t as big as first impressions may lead you to think. It is 82mm tall, 35.5mm thick, including the optional fan, and 74.5mm long, positioned along the M.2 drive’s length. JuiShark provides its own 6610 fan, which you can mount on either side of the tower heatsink as best fits your PC system. This fan is just 60mm in diameter. While we are on the topic, you should know other fan specs: it spins at up to 3,000 RPM, pushes 14 CFM, and generates up to 25.4 dBa noise.
Turning our attention to the tower heatsink, it is an aluminum block with 27 fins and pre-applied thermal paste. You can see a single heat pipe threaded through the fins. This heat pipe reportedly leverages copper with a nickel coating. Where the heat pipe and aluminum heatsink make contact with the M.2 SSD, the cooler’s material has been ground away by a CNC machine for better thermal conductivity.
Elsewhere in the construction of the cooler, JuiShark has used a stainless steel retainer mechanism to secure the cooling device to the SSD. It is a kind of tray design with four screws to secure everything in place. Though the whole device looks like a substantial construction, it is surprisingly and not reassuringly light at 113g in total. For reference, a budget classic tower CPU cooler like the Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo v2 weighs 662g.
The cooling performance chart shows the M.2 Three in active mode (fan cooled), passive (no fan) vs. a bare drive, under load. The test drive was a Samsung 980 Pro 500GB at an ambient temperature of 25 degrees Celsius. The top bar chart shows Flash NAND temperatures, and the one below shows the SSD controller temperature.
The JuiShark M.2 Three is available with either a blackened heatsink or bare aluminum. The ‘graphene’ blackened version costs 30 Yuan more, so its Chinese retail price is equivalent to $13.30, rather than $8.80. We might have been surprised by the light weight of the JuiShark M.2 Three, but it was pretty cheap.
