Look at the size of this absolute unit of an NVMe heatsink - and also it's discounted in the UK

I'm writing to you from the scene of a terrible spit-take accident, as seeing the size and height of this gaudy Thermalright NVMe heatsink caused me to emit a fine mist of water over my desk. No keyboards or computers were harmed in the inchident, but I thought I'd let you know that this heatsink is also discounted by nearly £2 - from £9.39 to £7.51!

• Get the Thermalright HR-09 NVMe heatsink for £7.51 (was £9.39)

In a world where the most popular NVMe SSD heatsinks are super short in order to boast PS5 compatibility, it's a breath of fresh air to see one that is unabashedly about pure performance no matter the (z-height) cost. This model measures a mighty 74mm (nearly three inches!) high, making it the largest I've ever seen.

Surprisingly, you might actually want a heatsink this big if you have a PCIe 5.0 SSD. These drives are capable of pushing past PCIe 4.0 alternatives, especially in terms of raw sequential reads and writes, but they produce a ton of heat while doing so - so performance can dip substantially over time.

Having a massive heatsink like this helps in two ways: by allowing the heatsink to shed heat more quickly over time and by lengthening the amount of time until the heatsink reaches its steady state. Having a much larger surface area helps the former - accomplished via a huge number of fins that allow a lot of air to reach the heatsink - while having a significant mass of metal aids the latter, allowing the heatsink to work for longer soaking up the heat energy rapidly from the drive before it is 'full' and is only able to remove heat at a slower rate.

It's a clever design then, and well worth considering if extended benchmarking your SSD (eg using CrystalDiskMark) reveals that performance drops over time.

In the market for an SSD? We've got some recommendations.