Categorically, what is the biggest problem with PCIe 5.0 drives? It’s scorching. At launch, and even now, these early 5.0 units, featuring a Phison E26 controller and 232-layer TLC Micron technology, run very scorching. To this extent, it was almost impossible to run such a device without some form of dynamic cooling. Corsair wasn’t immune to this either, despite its street cred as a storage manufacturer first and foremost, and the MP700 line initially featured a reference Phison cooler with a built-in fan and a bit of yellow branding to set it apart from the crowd.
A lot has changed since then, and we’ve seen a plethora of non-fan-cooled PCIe 5.0 solutions arrive. However, heat has always been a major problem.
That’s what the MP700 Elite seeks to fix in its bold and bold quest to become one of the best SSDs available today. In miniature, this is an extremely nice PCIe 5.0 drive that not only delivers relatively comfortable performance on the sequential front, but does so at both low power and dramatically lower temperatures. I’m not saying you can run this without a dedicated heatsink yet, but we’re getting close. However, this comes with some drawbacks.
In terms of hardware, Corsair has built the MP700 Elite around Kioxia’s latest 218-layer BiCS8 TLC NAND memory paired with Phison’s E321T controller. This means there is no DRAM cache or buffers, but honestly that’s not a substantial deal considering the raw bandwidth the Kioxia’s NAND memory can provide.
MP700 Elite specifications
Capacity: 2TB
Interface: PCIe 5.0×4
Memory Controller: Phison E321T
Flash memory: Kioxia 218-layer BiCS8 TLC NAND memory
Rated Performance: Continuous reading 10,000 MB/s, continuous writing 8500 MB/s
Resilience: 1200 TBW
Guarantee: Five years
Price: $260 | 235 pounds
It’s also worth mentioning that this is a single-sided M.2-2280 design, making it ideal for laptops and other consoles, although if you do opt for the heatsink version, be aware that it’s too enormous to fit in something like PS5 Pro (although you can easily disassemble it if you do so).
Unfortunately, at launch, the capacity selection is somewhat circumscribed. You can download one of them in a 1TB or 2TB configuration and that’s it. For this particular 2TB model I tested here, its retail price is relatively decent – $260 ($265 with heatsink) or £235 in the UK (£240 with heatsink). Unfortunately, AUD is not available yet.
Sure, the most vital thing I need to discuss first is temperatures, because is it really a fun ride? At least compared to other PCIe 5.0 offerings. To be clear, I almost always try to test all SSDs I get for review under the exact same heatsink and the same thermal pads. This was done on the Asus ROG Strix X870E-E motherboard. If the drive has a heatsink, if possible I remove it and drop it into the board for a full test suite.
For comparison, the Seagate FireCuda 540, a relatively early PCIe 5.0 drive, reached a temperature of 83°C during the benchmark test. The Crucial T700, which used its own integrated heatsink, reached a temperature of 87°C. Elite MP700? 55°C. The ambient temperature during testing was 24°C on all three SSDs. That’s just a staggering drop in overall heat, and if we’re generous and compare it to just the FireCuda 540, the difference between the two is 33.7%.
It’s all thanks to the latest E31T controller from Phison. In miniature, it’s basically a pseudo-evolution of the E26 found in most 5.0 drives to date (Teamgroup’s Z540 is a good example). Although it lacks DRAM and has half the channels and bandwidth, it is significantly more proficient than the original controllers. This is thanks to Phison moving its manufacturing process from its 12nm FinFET solution to TSMC’s 7nm N7 process. It also has half the number of channels, and due to power consumption, it has also been significantly reduced. This leads to a significant drop in overall temperature. Certainly compared to drives like Crucial’s T700 or Gigabyte’s Aorus Gen5 12000.
As far as the numbers game goes, overall sequential speeds are roughly what we saw when PCIe 5.0 first rolled out, though with one exception. Crystal Disk manages 10197 MB/s reading and 8608 MB/s writing respectively (the latter is slightly slower than the FireCuda 540 and Crucial T700).
However, the MP700 Elite rears its head in random 4K resolution. It dominates this field, reaching 88 MB/s read and a whopping 336 MB/s write, which outperformed both of our other PCIe 5.0 drives. When it came to in-game performance, it was basically in the middle of the pack, achieving a load time of 7.426 seconds in the Shadowbringers Final Fantasy test.
Testbed for PC gamers
Processor: AMD Ryzen 9 9900X | RAM: 64 GB (2×32 GB) Team Group T-Create Expert DDR5 @ 6000 C34 | Graphics card: Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Super | Motherboard: ASUS ROG Strix X870E-E Gaming WiFi | CPU Cooler: Asus ROG Ryujin III 360 ARGB Extreme | Power supply: 1200W NZXT C1200 (2024) 80+ Gold | Chassis: a geometric model of the future 5
The real kicker is the price. Many technologies and equipment that are relatively novel to the market were presented here. Whether it’s Phison’s E31T controller, which landed here in September 2024, or Kioxia’s latest 218-layer BiCS8 NAND drive, there’s a cost involved in putting it all together, even though the drive is featured as a kind of “mid-range”, it has stiff competition from older hardware that just works at the moment.
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Buy if…
✅ Random performance and 4K cooling have it all: The MP700 Elite delivers impressively high performance in random 4K resolution, as well as phenomenally low temperatures thanks to increased energy efficiency. This should translate well into the game.
Don’t buy if…
❌ Are you looking for the fastest sequential drive: At 8GB/s write and 10GB/s write, it lacks the sequential grunt of other older and cheaper PCIe 5.0 drives.
The Crucial T700 is a perfect example of this (and it’s not the only one either). If you choose the heatsinkless variant, you can get 2TB for just $210 at the time of writing, and that price has remained consistent for the past four months (and even lower during Black Friday). Corsair’s current MP700 Elite model is still slightly more high-priced, despite the price drop to $215. And honestly, you can only take advantage of this offer directly in the online store. True, the MP700 Elite with heatsink can be purchased for just $5 more compared to the $50 investment needed for the T700 heatsink, but in reality, most people purchasing this model will probably place it behind the motherboard’s M.2 heatsink anyway, negating this benefit. issue.
Then there is the performance difference between the two drives. While the 4K random numbers are higher on the MP700 Elite, those sequential numbers, especially for write performance, are awkwardly lower by contrast. Depending on your workload, this could be a real game-changer.
As with graphics cards and processors, it appears that at this point the excess heat produced by most current, less proficient PCIe 5.0 drives has already been accounted for and designed for. Whether this is due to better motherboard heatsinks or the standard heatsinks included with the drives themselves, this is no longer an issue. While the latest Phison controller is impressive, this is the technology that really needs to be leveraged to better improve the performance of the next generation of PCIe 6.0 SSDs. Combine these facts with how circumscribed this extra performance is for gamers, and, well, it’s a real challenging sell.
Still, the MP700 Elite is a solid all-around player. If you’re looking for something a little cheaper and budget is a factor, if you can find this thing on sale, it will live up to its promises and more, all without breaking the bank.
