Adata shocks with water-cooled SSDs and 1700 W consumption

Manufacturers are slowly but surely progressing with the announcements of SSD drives that support the PCIe 5.0 standard, the read and write performance of each new copy above 10 GB/s is quite astounding. However, the generation change is taking place at a considered pace, the majority of users are currently well used to PCI 3.0 and 4.0 generation storage, as their data transfer speeds are still more than sufficient for average home use. This is especially true for price-sensitive markets, even in our country most people are not necessarily looking for the fastest drives, rather the ever-improving price-storage capacity ratio is the main consideration during the purchase.

In addition, there is almost no PCI 5.0 SSD that does not experience an above-average heating phenomenon, some early specimens have several centimeter-thick ridges, sometimes spiked with a mini fan with a speed of over 8,000 revolutions per minute. Without it, the drive will overheat in a matter of seconds, resulting in a drastic decrease in speed.

This is what Adata wants to avoid, which is currently focusing most of its engineering work on perfecting the various cooling processes. Because peak performance may even require liquid cooling.

Hybrid methods, increased heat transfer surface

Without a model number, Project NeonStorm focuses exclusively on cooling, the basis of which is one of the fastest controllers and a pair of NAND chips, both of which are capable of sequential reading and writing of 14,000/12,000 MB per second. The pace is therefore very high, which is why the engineers are designing a special, double-system cooling for the printed circuit.

The basis of the special rib is the two-sided heat transfer pad and the metal surface attached to it, on which the manufacturer has integrated a water tank containing a heat transfer tube. A fan is located at each end of this, on one side the cool air comes in, while the other air stirrer extracts the heat generated in the heat pipe. The active airflow is continuous, which meets the amount of heat coming from the printed circuit through the metal sheet to the tube placed in the tank full of liquid. According to the manufacturer’s claim, the temperature can be reduced by 20% with this solution compared to a conventional SSD equipped with aluminum fins and a fan.

Less exciting, but according to engineering tests, the specially trained and coated fin mounted on the LEGEND 970 SSD can still achieve a 10% temperature drop. With this model, it was possible to find a perfect balance between cooling efficiency and physical size, during the design they tried to create the largest possible heat dissipating surface with a given fin size, which is also helped by the special, crystal-like coating. Data transfer records will not be broken by this storage, but 10000/10000 MB of data per second is still not bad.

Four RTX 4090 connected to one power supply

The demonstration of power does not only affect cooling-related developments, Adata also wants to draw attention to the power of power supplies belonging to the XPG product line. You will rarely see this in real use, but one power supply unit is sufficient for the power consumption of four RTX 4090 installed in one motherboard. The monitor connected to the configuration clearly shows the current power consumption, efficiency and the internal temperature of the power supply, according to the data, this is a loose task for the XPG model driving the machine.

Not in this machine, but in another power plant specially tuned for DDR5 tuning, a 9000 MT/s level demonstration is held with one of the new XPG module pairs in the company of an Intel Core i7-13000KF processor. The motherboard type is not interesting now, but from this clock signal (9000 MHz if you like) it can be guessed that in the second half of the year, newer CPUs capable of even rougher clock signals may arrive, primarily from Intel’s headquarters. Many people are already happy with the 6000 MHz level, but the future clearly leads to the 10 GHz DDR5 limit. Apparently, Adata is ready for this.

Our on-site reporting was supported by the organizer of Computex, TAITRA. THE The Budapest branch of Taiwan Trade Center is one of TAITRA’s 60 offices, which supports the joint work of Hungarian and Taiwanese businesses.

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