Beyond Overkill Cooling – Jiushark M.2-THREE SSD Heatsink Review

Today’s review will cover a radical new product from Jiushark. For those unfamiliar with them, Jiushark is cooling company based out of China that has made quite a few innovative products which stand out from the crowd. I’ve recently reviewed both the JF13K Diamond and it’s successor the JF13K Diamond Mini at Tom’s Hardware, which are large top down CPU coolers unlike any others on the market.

Pros

• Best performance of any NVMe heatsink I’ve tested
• Direct Touch Copper Heatpipe

Cons

• Tall profile means it’s not compatible next to most CPU Air coolers

The Jiushark product I’ll be reviewing today is the M.2-THREE NVMe SSD cooler. This is a SSD heatsink unlike any other, with heatsink area rivaling SFF CPU coolers. This is bound to be a controversial product, and I expect nothing but top tier performance from it. Does Jiushark deliver? We’ll take a quick look at the features and installation before diving into the thermal benchmarks.

Packaging and Installation

Jiushark’s M.2-THREE arrives in a small box with molded foam for the protection of the inner contents.

The installation of most NVMe heatsinks is similar.

• Remove the screws to separate the base from the heatsink.
• Take one of the included thermal pads and apply it to the base.
• Place the SSD on the base

• Place the next thermal pad on top of the SSD
• Secure the base to the base using the included screws

• Set the SSD and heatsink into the m.2 slot and secure it
• Connect the PWM cable

Features of the Jiushark M.2-THREE

60mm active fan

Jiushark includes a 60mm active fan for supreme cooling performance. SSD coolers with active fans I test at 63% PWM, because these smaller units don’t need fans to run at full speeds and by running them at reduced PWM they run quieter than the sound of my system fans at idle. So if you’re asking if the Juishark M.2-THREE runs loudly – it does not, at least not the way I test the unit.

Direct Touch Copper Heatpipe, Double Heatsinks

To effectively transfer heat from the SSD to the heatsink, Jiushark incorporates a full size direct touch copper heatpipe similar to those found with many CPU coolers.

The M.2-THREE has two heatsinks. At the base of the unit it has a thick heatsink with groves, with a small heatsink reminiscent of SFF CPU coolers connected by the direct touch copper heatpipe.

Dual sided SSD support, Two sets of thermal pads

It’s worth pointing out this heatsink is designed to help cool both top and bottom sides of a SSD – some units only effectively cool NVMe SSDs on the top. Jiushark also includes two sizes of thermal pads to provide the best fit for your storage drive.

Pictures of the installed unit, compatibility issues

The picture below shows the M.2-THREE installed in my i7-13700K system. This heatsink won’t be compatible with air coolers if you choose to install it next to the CPU. If you opt to use the fan, you may need to move the fan to the other side of the heatsink depending on the thickness of your GPU.

Testing Configuration and why I test this way

CPU: Intel i7-13700K
Motherboard: MSI Z690 A Pro DDR4
Computer Case: BeQuiet Silent Base 802, System fans set to low
SSD: TeamGroup T-Force Z540 PCI-e 5 SSD, limited to PCI-e 4 speeds

To test the performance of the heatsinks cooling ability, I’ve run a custom IOMeter script which takes 30 minutes to complete testing. This script is designed to cause the drive, and especially it’s controller, to create as much heat as possible. The reason I’m testing this way is to “futureproof” these reviews to an extent. The purpose of this test isn’t to test performance, but to test how well a heatsink dissipates heat and cools a SSD.

With most SSDs on the market today, consumers won’t observe significant performance variance in things like gaming or loading common applications unless the SSD is completely uncooled or using the weakest of heatsinks on the market. If I only looked at performance, a review made today might not be accurate with tomorrow’s next generation PCI-e 6 and beyond storage solutions, but because this test properly saturates most heatsinks it will still be useful in 2025 and beyond (or at least until we move to another form factor for storage).

Thermal Performance & Comparison Results

The performance of Jiushark’s M.2-THREE is unrivaled, keeping the Teamgroup Z540 SSD 6C cooler than it’s nearest competitor. Even with it’s fan removed, it was only beaten by a single cooler – NewHail’s NH1.

I’ve color coded the results to give y’all a better idea of how I rank these heatsinks. Users of PCI-e 5 drives are advised to use a heatsink with results colored in green or blue if they intend to run storage intensive workloads. The results in green will be sufficient to run unthrottled, the results in blue are absolute overkill.

The results in red ran at or near the SSD’s peak temperature. The worst of these throttled to various degrees (which you can see below) should be considered insufficient for users looking to maintain peak performance – remember, my test platform is limited to PCI-e 4.0, and so if you’re going to run a PCI-e 5 storage platform you’ll want something stronger than the results in red.

Here are the performance results of the failing heatsinks like Coolmoon’s CM-M2A for consideration.

Value Comparison

Jiushark’s M.2-Three isn’t a product you buy for it’s value. It’s a product you buy when you want the best performance, bar none. So I won’t be comparing value – if you want the best performance on the market, this is it. If you want value, buy a basic heatsink.

Conclusion

This is the strongest NVMe heatsink on the market, bar none. Even with it’s fan removed, Jiushark’s M.2-THREE dominates my cooling benchmarks. With the fan installed, it performed 6C better than its closest competitor despite being limited to 63% PWM. This NVMe heatsink is utterly overkill for today’s storage solutions, delivering performance far in excess of what anyone will have need – but that just means it is futureproof, and will be strong enough to handle even the craziest of PCI-e 6 SSDs.