GALAX HOF Extreme 50 Gen5 SSD With Active-Cooling Runs At A Cool Sub-50C Temp Under Heavy Load

GALAX recently introduced its brand new HOF Extreme 50 PCIe Gen5 SSD which comes with a sleek active cooling solution. The company has shown off the first thermal tests of the SSD which delivers upon the promise of sub-50C temps.

GALAX HOF Extreme 50 Gen5 SSD Runs Below 50C Under Heavy Load Thanks To High-End Cooling Design

In terms of design, the GALAX HOF Extreme 50 SSD comes with a glossy metallic shroud that covers the aluminum heatsink. Within this shroud is a singular active-cooling fan which keeps the SSD cool under heavy loads.

In terms of specifications, the GALAX HOF Extreme 50 PCIe Gen 5 NVMe M.2 SSD makes use of the Phison PS5026-E26 controller based on a TSMC 12nm process and a 232-layer 3D TLC NAND Flash memory. The HOF Extreme 50 SSDs will come in two flavors, a 1 TB variant with Read and Write speeds of 9500 MB/s (1,300,000 IOPS) and 8500 MB/s (1,100,000 IOPS) while the 2 TB variant will have Read and Write speeds rated at 10,000 MB/s (1,500,000 IOPS) and 9500 MB/s (1,250,000 IOPS).

So coming to the tests, GALAX tested the HOF Extreme 50 Gen5 SSD under an ambient temp of 20C and the storage device idled at 40C. A range of tests and benchmarks were run including PCMark 8 where the device peaked at 47C and ran close to 44-45C during file transfers & other 3DMark tests. These are some really good performance figures and showcase that heat won't be a thing to worry about if you're getting a high-end Gen5 device. We noticed similar results in our Gen5 review where the bulk of the new SSDs averaged close to 50C with their high-end heatsink designs.

2 of 9

If you are getting a PCIe Gen5 SSD that doesn't feature a high-end heatsink or active cooler but you do own a high-end motherboard that provides at least one M.2 slot with a hefty heatsink, that will also be more than enough to keep the Gen5 devices running cool and stable under any kind of workload.

You can definitely save a lot of cash on the non-heatsink SSDs but if you want something that looks good, then paying a premium for HOF Extreme 50 SSD from GALAX might be worth it. The 2 TB variant costs 2499 RMB or around $350 US which is the average price of most 2 TB 10.0 GB/s Gen5 SSDs.

Written by Hassan Mujtaba