The Passively Cooled AORUS Gen5 10000 SSD

Meet The Thermal Guard XTREME Heatsink

TweakTown got their hands on another PS5026-E26 based drive, this time from Gigabyte.  Unlike many of the other PCIe 5.0 drives on the market the AORUS Gen5 10000 SSD doesn’t sport a fan on it’s large cooler.   The cooler is apparently coated in nanocarbons heatsink and is an impressive 44.7 mm tall (1.75″).  The size is certainly effective as testing never brought the temperature of the drive to 60c, remaining cool enough that there was never any thermal throttling.  It won’t fit in every slot on your board, thanks to a number of motherboard makers liking to hid an M.2 slot under your GPU so make sure to keep that in mind.

The performance matches or beats the other PCIe 5.0 drives TweakTown has tested, reading and writing at over 10,000MB/s in CrystalDiskMark and other benchmarks.  The AORUS Gen5 10000 SSD also came out on top in their 100GB copy test and their 13GB read test as well.  Interestingly the drive did over 10% better on the B650E test bed than it did on the Z590 based one.

Currently the drive is hard to find for sale, but once stock returns you should expect to have to invest around $339.99 for the 2TB model.  A little more expensive than the PCIe 4.0 drives out there but you always have to pay to get the best.