Corsair MP700 Pro SE

After releasing the MP700 Pro with a chunky heatsink, Corsair is back with the MP700 SE—this time without the heatsink and faster speeds. Considering that PCIe 5.0 SSDs are targeted towards enthusiasts, there is a good chance that they might bring their own cooling solution or use something already provided by the motherboard manufacturer. As for the claimed speed increase, that might just come as part of the larger 4TB capacity.

Corsair is claiming speeds of up to 14,000MB/sec sequential read speeds and up to 12,000MB/sec sequential write speeds. That’s up from 12,400MB/sec read and 11,800MB/sed write speeds Corsair mentioned on the older MP700 Pro. I’ll take it. Also, the storage capacity bump from 2TB to 4TB is great fo content creators that want blazing-fast speed to work on their 8K videos.

Bring your own cooling

The MP700 Pro SE is a four-lane solid-state drive running the NVMe 2.0 protocol over the PCI Express 5.0 bus. This two-sided internal SSD comes in the standard M.2 Type-2280 "gumstick" format. Like the other PCIe 5.0 SSDs we have reviewed—the MP700 Pro SE uses Micron 232-layer 3D TLC NAND chips and Phison's Gen 5-optimized PS5026-E26 controller.

However, like every other PCIe 5.0 drive we've tested, the MP700 Pro SE runs super hot and Corsair is expecting you to provide cooling for it as unlike the MP700 Pro, which came with an active heatsink, the SE comes without any cooling. That's ok as there is a good chance that you'll be equipping this on a motherboard that already comes with massive heatsinks for NVMe drives. Or if you're a full-on overclocker, you'll likely use your own water-cooling solution.

Whatever your decision, make sure you do equip it with a good heatsink otherwise those shooting temperatures will bring those crazy fast speeds much lower. The drive unit we received is 4TB in capacity which, as per Corsair's website, is the only capacity its currently available in.

Such high-end and fast storage comes at price and Corsair is charging US$625 (AED 2299) for it which is quite a bit more expensive than the 2TB version. Thankfully you are getting the Corsair 5 year warranty with it.

System Requirements: Gen 5

To take advantage of the ridiculous speeds the MP700 Pro SE offers, you'll need recent hardware that supports the PCIe Gen5 standard for NVMe drives. You'll need an Intel 12th, 13th, or 14th Generation Core CPU with a motherboard based on Intel's Z690 or Z790 chipset; or a Ryzen 7000 processor with an AM5 motherboard built around an X670, X670E, or B650E chipset.

An important adjunct to all that: Just because you have one of those chipsets doesn't guarantee that the motherboard maker actually implemented a PCIe 5.0-capable M.2 SSD slot. In fact, the super high-end ASUS ROG Strix Z790-E Gaming WIFI II we used to test this did not have a built-in PCIe 5.0 M.2 slot and we had to use an external PCIe card.

That Asus Z790 chipset motherboard was running an Intel Core i9 13900K, 64GB (two Corsair 32GB DIMMs) of DDR5 memory, an AMD Radeon 7900 XTX GPU with 24GB DDR6 and a Corsair 1200-watt power supply. The boot drive is Samsung 980 Pro PCIe 4.0 SSD.

The fastest Gen 5 Drive we've tested

We ran CrystalMark to test the scores and the results were very much in line with Corsair's claimed speeds of 14,000MB/sec sequential read speeds and up to 12,000MB/sec sequential write speeds.

That being said, our hacked up solution of slapping a heatsink with thermal pads couldn't quite keep up with the drive's temperatures when running the full suite of benchmarks. Temperatures reached over 80 degrees Celsius and, as expected the drive throttled after a few minutes of benchmarking. Real-world usage will be much easier on the drive as you are not continuously pushing it for minutes at a time but you still need a good cooling solution for it.

If you have the hardware to take advantage of the Corsair MP 700 SE and you can manage to keep it cool, expect a blistering performance out of it. The 4TB capacity opens it up a wider audience as well. Not only will this drive appeal to the gamers and enthusiasts but someone working on super large video files will also appreciate the speed and size of it.

At US$625 (AED 2,299), it's not cheap but Corsair MP700 Pro brings enough to the board to become our new Editors' Choice winner for PCI Express 5.0 SSDs.