Model: be quiet! MC1 and MC1 Pro M.2 SSD Coolers
Manufacturer: be quiet!
Provided By: be quiet!
be quiet! is a premium brand of power supplies, PC cases, water and air cooling and fans for desktop PCs. Founded more than 20 years ago by the German company Listan GmbH, be quiet! has a passion for quality and precision as well as a special focus on details. As a result, be quiet!'s products offer first-class performance and are among the most silent ones on the market.
In addition to a number of air and water coolers for CPUs, be quiet! recently introduced a pair of coolers for M.2 SSDs. The MC1 and MC1 Pro both feature an all-black finish for an elegant look and provide efficient cooling, enabling maximum read and write speeds for single and double sided M.2 2280 modules. Where the MC1 is slim enough to fit in a PS5, the MC1 Pro takes things to another level with an integrated heat pipe for even higher cooling performance.
Packaging:
The MC1 and MC1 Pro ship in small, brown boxes. Along with the be quiet! name, the front and back show the model and that an M.2 cooler is inside. On the back, you'll also find be quiet!'s address as well as the article (part) number and UPC bar code.
The contents of both boxes are very similar. Inside of a plastic tray, you'll find the top and bottom portions of the cooler, a small screwdriver, four screws, warranty information and a small instruction manual.
Physical Features:
From the top and bottom, the MC1 and MC1 Pro look very similar. The two coolers are 24mm wide and 74mm long and the tops are covered almost entirely by a finned heatsink.
From the side, you can see the biggest difference between the MC1 and MC1 Pro. Where the MC1 is 11mm tall with a double-sided SSD installed, the MC1 Pro is 15mm tall. At this height, the MC1 Pro is too tall to fit in the PS5 like the MC1. You'll also want to make sure that it doesn't interfere with your video card if the motherboard's M.2 slot is below it.
The MC1 Pro's extra height is due to its heatpipe, which runs up and down the length of the top of the cooler. The heatpipe is covered almost entirely by a large thermal pad. However, you can see it on the end of the cooler.
Setup:
Installing an SSD in be quiet!'s MC1 and MC1 Pro coolers is very easy. To begin, remove the blue, protective covering from the thermal pad on the back plate. From there, you can place your SSD onto the pad. You'll want to make sure that the cut outs for the screws are lined up.
The next step is to remove the protective covering from the thermal pad on the upper portion of the cooler. With that out of the way, you can place the upper portion of the cooler onto the SSD and then screw it into place using the included screws and screwdriver.
With the cooler now installed, you can put the SSD into an M.2 slot on your computer's motherboard or, in the case of the MC1, your PS5. As I mentioned earlier, you'll want to make sure that the cooler does not interfere with any of the components around the slot or something like a video card that may be above it.
Performance:
The test system used in this review is equipped with an AMD Ryzen 5 3700x CPU, MSI B550 GAMING PLUS motherboard, 16GB (8GB x 2) of Crucial Ballistix 3200 MHz DDR4 memory, Crucial P5 1TB SSD and a GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 1060 WINDFORCE OC 6G graphics card. For the operating system, I used the latest version of Windows 10 Pro.
To test the performance of be quiet!'s MC1 and MC1 Pro coolers, I ran a series of benchmarks using Iometer with Crucial's P5 Plus and Western Digital's WD_BLACK SN850 PCIe 4.0 SSDs. I ran a sequential read test for five minutes, let the drive rest for five minutes and then ran a sequential write test for another five minutes. During these tests, the drives' temperatures were monitored using Hard Disk Sentinel (HDSentinel) software.
The MC1 and MC1 Pro did an incredible job of reducing the operating temperature of both the WD_BLACK SN850 and Crucial P5 Plus. With the MC1, I saw temperatures drop by as much as 22 degrees with the SN850 when it was writing. Thanks to its built-in heat pipe, the temperatures were even lower with MC1 Pro. On average, temperatures dropped by another 5 degrees when reading and writing.
Final Thoughts:
The MC1 and MC1 Pro are the first products from be quiet! to come through the 'Labs and, to be honest, they could not have made a better first impression. Despite being reasonably priced, these M.2 SSD coolers look great and are manufactured using high quality materials. More importantly though, the two do a great job of keeping your drive cool. The only problem people will have is deciding whether to get the PS5 friendly MC1 or spend a few dollars more to get the larger, heatpipe equipped MC1 Pro.
The MC1 and MC1 Pro are available now and can be purchased on Amazon for $14 and $17, respectively.