Leaving that aside, the Corsair MP700 Pro SE offers support for Trim, SMART, Garbage Collection and even 256-bit AES encryption, has SK Hynix 3D TLC memory chips and 8 GB of NAND SLC cache, all of which give this unit 4 TB of 3,000 TBW, so in essence, no matter how much you write on the SSD, it is quite likely that you will end up changing PCs before exhausting its durability.
Unboxing and external analysis
The Corsair MP700 Pro SE comes packaged in a simple soft cardboard blister in the usual black and yellow colors used by the manufacturer. On the front we can see an image of the unit accompanied by its name and its main characteristics in the lower area.
On the back, apart from the compliance labels and logos, we only find text in several languages ​​telling us that the speeds advertised on the front are for PCIe 5.0, since as you well know, it can be installed in a PCIe 4.0 socket. no problem although it will have limited speed.
Inside we find a brief instruction manual, as well as a brochure to inform us about safety and compliance.
Of course, we also have the MP700 Pro SE in a transparent plastic blister which, in this case, comes with a label that, this time only in English, tells us that “This high-performance SSD requires a heatsink to operate at its speed.” optimal. This can be either the one on your motherboard or a separate M.2 2280 heatsink.
Basically it tells us what we have explained to you before, that it comes without a heatsink and is designed for you to use the one on the motherboard, although if it doesn’t have one, you will have to buy and install one on your own. Don’t even think about using a PCIe 5.0 SSD without a heatsink because they generally generate a lot of heat.
Here you have the Corsair MP700 Pro SE now out of its packaging and box; It seems incredible that this SSD that is physically no different from a €50 one has the price it has, right? Of course, physically… we’ll see later how it works, that’s what you’re paying for.
This label that covers the chips and the controller is not a label as such, but rather it has a certain thickness and, in fact, if you try to remove it, it bends and then looks very bad. In the following image it is quite clear that it has a small dissipation layer, perhaps because the DRAM chips and the controller are not the same height, with the aim of leveling everything for when we mount it and put a heatsink on it.
On the back we have another label, which in this case is a label as such but which is one of those that when you remove it, it leaves the entire mark on the chips so that it can be seen that you have removed it and thus void the warranty. However, here one of the chips is exposed and we can see that they are from SK Hynix.
Having seen the SSD, we are going to proceed to install it and check how it works.
How do you install the Corsair MP700 Pro SE?
In our case we are going to test this Corsair SSD on our usual test bench, in which we use an ASUS ROG Strix Z790 Gaming WiFi II motherboard that incorporates an M.2 PCIe 5.0 socket with a built-in heatsink.
Only by removing two screws we can remove the heatsink and have access to the M.2 socket, which by the way has thermal pads both on the side of the heatsink and on the side under the SSD; In fact, unlike what happens in many M.2 sockets on motherboards, the SSD is mounted resting on this thermal pad because it also has a heatsink underneath, instead of being exposed.
Then it is simply a matter of placing the heatsink back on top and retightening the two screws.
An important aspect must be taken into account, and that is that in most motherboards the only M.2 PCIe 5.0 socket is the one located precisely between the processor socket and the first PCIe for the graphics card, making the gap that remains is rather scarce (for example, in our case we had to dismantle the graphics card to be able to access the socket).
It’s not that the graphics card covers the SSD heatsink, but it certainly remains inaccessible.
Well, with the SSD already mounted, let’s now test its performance.
Testing the Corsair MP700 Pro SE
To test this Corsair MP700 Pro SE SSD we have used the following hardware:
- Intel Core i9-14900K
- be quiet! Dark Rock Pro 5
- ASUS ROG STRIX Z790 Gaming WiFi II
- 2×24 GB G.Skill Trident Z5 RGB 7,200 MHz
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER Founders Edition
- TeamGroup Cardea A440 Pro 2 TB PCIe 4.0
- Corsair Obsidian 4000D Airflow
- be quiet! Straight Power 12 1000W
As you may already guess, in order to test this SSD to the maximum of its performance we have it as secondary, so the PCIe 4.0 SSD is the one on which we have the operating system and so on, so that having the OS installed on the SSD does not hinder performance on tests.
Noise and temperature
As this SSD does not come with a heatsink, we will actually be judging the performance of the one that comes with the motherboard, although it is true that it will also help us to know if this is enough or if this specific SSD requires an extra heatsink. …forceful. For the same reason, since it is a passive heatsink there is no noise, so we go directly to the temperature.
This is the temperature with the SSD at rest, having about 23ºC ambient temperature.
29ºC is nothing, but nothing at all, so let’s look at the maximum temperature reached during our stress tests.
Well hey, 46ºC temperature is only 23ºC Delta, an extraordinarily good result that tells us that either the heatsink that comes with this ASUS board is amazingly good, or the Corsair MP700 Pro SE doesn’t heat up almost at all, or well a combination of both. In any case, in the area of ​​temperature we can only give it an A+.
The software: Corsair SSD Toolbox
It is curious that a manufacturer like Corsair, which has unified software (iCUE) for all its hardware, continues to use the archaic SSD Toolbox for its SSDs instead of integrating its configuration into iCUE. In any case, here we have it: in the first tab we can see the technical information of the units connected to the computer, and not just those from Corsair.
In the second tab we can configure overprovisioning of the unit.
In the third, the SMART state
The three remaining tabs are tools: we can clone the disk, optimize (which is nothing more than forcing the execution of the Trim command, something unnecessary because Windows already does it) and securely erase the SSD.
As we said, we don’t really understand how, with the category that Corsair has, it doesn’t integrate all this into iCUE instead of continuing to use an application that looks like it’s from a PC from the 90s, to be honest. But hey, it works without problems and you should know that it is completely optional, you do not need to install it for the SSD to work well.
Test of performance
Let’s finally get to the performance tests, and how could we not start with Crystal Disk Markwhich is what is going to give us that desired maximum reading and writing speed data.
Let’s remember that on paper, this SSD offers 14,000 MB/s reading and 12,000 MB/s writing, and as you can see in the screenshot above, it far exceeds these data.
With AS SSD Benchmark we are going to measure performance in a similar way, although with different algorithms that generally give a much lower result, but since it assigns a subjective score we can compare with other SSDs.
As we said, the data is much lower, but we have scores. For example, the PNY CS3150, which is also PCIe 5.0 and uses the same controller, obtained a final score of 13,715, falling below this Corsair SSD (and in fact the speeds it gave us were significantly lower).
This benchmark has two additional subtests, the first to show us how long it takes to copy different things like an ISO, a program or a game.
Just tenths of a second, as you can see. It also has another benchmark that is more interesting since it consists of checking how the SSD handles non-compressible files, which are usually the Achilles heel of this type of units.
Well, as you can see, except for a peak in the reading speed at the beginning, there are no problems with non-compressible files.
Another weak point of SSDs is small file sizes; Generally, even 64K files do not begin to give their full potential, so let’s see how this Corsair MP700 Pro SE performs with ATTO Disk Benchmark for it.
As expected, it does not begin to develop its full potential until 64-128KB in size, and in fact it must be said that with files of 512 bytes and 1 KB the performance is very, very low, although in line with of this type of SSD.
Finally, we have to see what performance Anvil Benchmark gives us.
The result is excellent, without a doubt, with a score that also scores almost 4,000 points over the PNY SSD that we mentioned before and that uses the same controller and interface. Without a doubt, the performance of this Corsair SSD is overwhelming.
Conclusion and verdict
With the launch of the MP700 Pro SE, Corsair once again sits on the performance throne in the PC SSD space. With speeds that far exceed 14 GB/s read and 12 GB/s write, at the time of writing this review there is no SSD with more performance than this one, and that is not saying something, really.
The truth is that we also have to mention that we liked that the SSD comes “naked”, without a heatsink. After all, the vast majority of modern motherboards already have passive heatsinks for SSDs, and as we have seen for ourselves, they are more than enough to keep the SSD running at a good temperature and avoid Thermal Throttling.
Now, not all are good words because there is one aspect that will greatly spoil the final score of this SSD: the price. 719.99 euros for a 4 TB SSD that comes without a heatsink seems almost absurd to us, and I’m very sorry if it sounds harsh, but from our point of view only the luckiest pockets will even consider spending that money.
It is not that this is (entirely) a Corsair thing, the prices of SSDs have skyrocketed lately and much more so for PCIe 5.0, but we have to be realistic and the reality is that although all of us hardware fans always like to have the best possible performance, you really have very worthy SSDs with the same capacity for much less money.
All in all, we consider that this Corsair MP700 Pro SE deserves our gold award, as well as our recommendation, as it could not be otherwise due to its impressive performance.
