Why you can trust Tom's Hardware Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test.
Thermal Results
The thermal results of TeamGroup’s T-Force Dark Airflow I were phenomenal, stronger than any other SSD heatsink I’ve tested with a recorded temperature of only 39 degrees Celsius at the end of testing. It will ensure your SSD’s storage is consistent and is capable of cooling any workload thrown at your NVMe drive – no matter how intensive it is.
Noise Levels
When I’ve tested NVMe heatsinks with fans, I always test them with my motherboard’s default setting, shown below. I don’t bother to adjust this because at this setting, none of the units I’ve tested ran louder than my system fans at idle – and I like a nice, quietly running system.
Personally, I think it would be quite pointless to run any of these heatsink fans at full speed. You won’t gain any performance, and this heatsink performs rather well even without a fan! If you are so inclined to run the fans at full speed, TeamGroup’s Dark Airflow I will reach up to 45.3 dBA. That’s just slightly quieter than Thermalright’s Phantom Spirit 120 EVO CPU cooler.
But really folks – don’t run the fans of your SSD cooler at full speed. It doesn’t effectively do anything but increase noise levels.
Conclusion
TeamGroup’s T-Force Dark Airflow I is the SSD heatsink cooler you should buy if you’re looking for the best thermal performance on the market and don’t have concerns about price. Even with its fan removed, it kept our test SSD at 52 degrees Celsius after 30 minutes of stress testing, which is a very impressive result.
It’s expensive and more complicated than smaller passive coolers, and it’s certainly overkill for the average consumer. But if you have an expensive high-end, high-capacity SSD and you often run storage-intensive workloads, $35 is a small price to pay to make sure you maintain the best performance possible while keeping the drive cool enough that heat doesn’t negatively affect the drive’s longevity.
