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.
