Our Verdict
76%
Faster than a PCIe 4 drive, but at this price you may as well spend a little extra money for the Crucial T700, which is much faster in sequential tests.
We’re now in the super-fast era of PCIe 5 SSDs, and the Corsair MP700 is the company’s first drive to use the massive bandwidth available from the interface. While the Corsair MP700 benchmarks easily outpace even the best PCIe 4 drives, though, Corsair hasn’t gone all out on speed, and is instead intending to balance performance with price, offering speeds of up to 9,500MB/s for the $150 price of a 1TB drive, and 10,000MB/s on the 2TB model.
The Corsair MP700 is only available in 2TB or 1TB models and we’ve tested the former for this review. This capacity limit already puts it at a disadvantage against the competing Crucial T700, which is also available in a 4TB capacity. It’s cheaper than the Crucial, though, and it has a slightly higher endurance rating as well. The 2TB model gets an endurance rating of 1,400TBW, while the Crucial stands at 1,200TWB, which is a small perk, but both SSDs’ warranties stand at five years.
Considering the claimed speeds of this drive, we were surprised to see that there’s no option to buy it with a heatsink. It was originally meant to come with a heatsink, but the company decided to go heatsinkless for this model.
That’s not a huge issue, though, since most motherboards with PCIe 5 M.2 ports feature large heatsinks anyway. You’ll definitely need a heastink, though, as the Corsair MP700 gets very hot and will throttle quickly without one. Also, while the Crucial T700 does have a heatsink option, it was barely up to the task of keeping the SSD cool. Using your motherboard’s own M.2 heatsink is definitely a better option with these PCIe5 SSDs.
Both SSDs support Microsoft’s DirectStorage too, which allows the SSD to communicate directly with your graphics card to improve load times. The two SSDs are similar under the sticker as well, with a Phison E26 controller, Micron TCL memory, and 2GB of DDR4 cache. However, Corsair’s SSD is a good 2,000MB/s slower than the Crucial. Despite this drop in performance, the savings are disappointingly meager as well, with the 2TB Crucial available for around $300 and Corsair only shaving around $20 off that price.
Corsair MP700 sequential performance
The Corsair MP700 was right on the money with its sequential speeds, sitting at 10,000MB/sec in both our read and write tests in CrystalDiskMark, which are around 2,000MB/sec slower than the Crucial T700. AS-SSD was a little slower too. with a read speed of 7,911MB/s compared to 9,129MB/s on the Crucial drive, but it had a similar write speed at 9,113MB/s compared to 9,191MB/s. The Corsair MP700 is still a great SSD for sequential speeds, easily adding around 3,000MB/s on top of the fastest PCIe 4 SSDs, such as the Samsung 980 Pro, but losing out to the Crucial’s T700’s 12,000MB/s speeds.
Corsair MP700 random performance
The Corsair MP700 random 4K performance was slightly lower than that of the Crucial T700, with a 6,113MB/s read speed and 6,473MB/s write speed in CrystalDiskMark, compared with 6,405 MB/s and 6,758 MB/s, but we’re talking just a couple of hundred megabytes a second. This effectively means the Corsair MP700 sits among the faster PCIe 4 SSDs available in the 4K Q32T16 random test.
In the Q1T1 CrystalDiskMark test, the Corsair MP700 was again slower than the Crucial T700 in the read test, but actually 90MB/s faster in the write test, with results of 78MB/s and 315MB/s respectively. The Corsair MP700 was slightly faster than the T700 in the same test in AS-SSD too.
Corsair MP700 real-world performance
In PCMark 10’s full system drive benchmark, the Corsair MP700’s bandwidth of 603MB/s was actually slightly ahead of the Crucial T700’s result, and with a marginally higher overall score of 3,836 compared to 3,754MB. It’s clear that in some real-world tests, the higher sequential speeds of the Crucial don’t count for much, and the Corsair MP700’s higher random write speeds count for more. These results are also far higher than those of a mid-range PCIe 4 SSD, which sit at around 414MB/s with a score of 2,605,
Corsair MP700 Pros and cons
Pros
- Excellent sequential speeds
- Decent random 4K speeds
- Cheaper than other PCIe 5 SSDs
Cons
- Faster Crucial T700 doesn’t cost much more
- Requires a heatsink
- Doesn’t really stand out
Corsair MP700 specs
The Corsair MP700 specs list is:
| Full capacity | 2 TB |
| Formatted capacity | 1.81 TB |
| Heatsink option | No |
| Capacities available | 1 TB, 2 TB (tested) |
| NAND | TLC |
| Controller | Phison E26 |
| Endurance rating | 2,400 TBW (2 TB model) |
| Warranty | Five years |
Corsair MP700 price
The Corsair MP700 price is more expensive than PCIe 4 SSDs, but only a little bit cheaper than the faster PCIe 5 competition.
Price: $285 (£239).
Corsair MP700 review conclusion
Corsair gets a lot right with the MP700. It has lower price than some competitors, excellent real-world performance, and it ditches a somewhat pointless heatsink that probably struggle to cool this toasty SSD anyway. Its main issue is that it lags behind the Crucial T700 in sequential speeds, which loses it some bragging power too.
If you’re going all out with the latest tech, you want the fastest hardware and likely won’t be bothered by the fact that the MP700 is a bit cheaper than the T700. You’ll be more bothered by the fact that the slightly more expensive Crucial T700 is 2,000MB/s faster, even if it doesn’t amount to much outside those raw sequential performance numbers.
If you’re looking for a faster PCIe 5 drive than the Corsair MP700, or if you’re looking to upgrade your SSD on an older PCIe 3 or PCIe 4 motherboard, check out our full guide to the best gaming SSD, where we take you through all the best options at a range of prices.