Nice, good to know. I guess I should not cheap out in that regard with the next build.

F I N A L L Y someone else says that a M.2 placed above the gpu is not good - after years telling people that 9/10 motherboards had awful design with the M.2 above the gpu or on it's side getting all the hot air (the only good one was the MSI TRX40 Creator who had two m.2 at the bottom of the motherboard and 1 vertically on the right of the ddr slots, all 3 away from heat sources and in places that had better airflow) - that the 5.0 M.2 from the latest asus Z690 extreme was the most stupid thing ever and was UNUSABLE (because not only does it kill your gpu bandwith, currently it divides it by 4x not 2x...4x !) but it means their stupid idiotic giant heatsink 1mm above the gpu backplate is actively HEATING your M.2 "who whould have guessed that placing a heat exchanger 1mm above a 80-100°C plate would not cool it...woaw I'm shocked !" (that's what you get when you claim to give useful info to consumers but keep using test benches because it makes YOUR job easier...but then all your measurements are trash because an open test bench is not a real computer aka a closed case) I'm afraid that's too late for the next AMD lineup because I noticed on the announcement they also looked like they had heatsinks almost touching the gpu, so another fake slot that you really shouldn't use, not like you want it anyway...see my rants on why pcie 5.0 is worst than 4.0 (you gain nothing but only lose more bandwith when the x16 is split between the pcie slots) maybe that's the reason why AMD went dual chipset...I hope so when they say : your pcie slot is x16 x8 x4 it's not : x of 5.0 speed it's : of whatever pcie speed your peripheral is so when your gpu pcie slot goes from 16x 5.0 (52Tb/s) down to x8 it's not x8 5.0 (26Tb/s) it's x8 4.0 at best which is 1/4 speed or x16 3.0 (13Tb/s) and yes you lose performance with high end videocards

Thank you for this review. Something everyone should consider in hot summer days if they want their their NVMe storage to perform right and most important to have a long life. Freaking hot NVMe SSDs for years are on my "cooling OCD" list so not a big deal for me, it's just one more thing that screams for heatsink to be slapped on it and/or airflow in case to be adjusted so it would be properly cooled.

These are baby heatsinks. Should have tested the big boi from Thermalright... http://www.thermalright.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/HR-09-2280-PRO-1500%E4%B8%BB%E5%9B%BE1-600x600.jpg

Very well done review and indeed needed for the Guru3d community to get well informed on nvme throttling. there are a lot of cheap good alternatives if you look on Amazon and ebay to cool your nvme 🙂 , i'm personally using an nvme water block ( corsair ) beacuse my Sabrent Rocket Plus 2Tb runs hot af and since my whole built is water cooled i added the little water block for it and it never reaches over 45c under the heviest of loads / huge file transfers ( movies / Games / Data , etc... ). Cool your nvmes is a must to get everyhting out of them without throttling , even the integrated mobo heatsink will help.

Nice review. It's good to see (by comparison) that my mainboard's M.2 heatsinks seem to be doing their cooling job quite well. I do wonder how a good M.2 SSD Waterblock would do, however. Perhaps it would be something to add to the review down the line.

kakiharaFRS:

F I N A L L Y someone else says that a M.2 placed above the gpu is not good

Indeed. Although having the GPU mounted vertically and a bit away from the mainboard with enough airflow in between will help a lot. Depends on the case and the GPU cooler, though, so the GPU has enough air to breathe and doesn't blow hot air at the mainboard/M.2 SSD like some blow through GPU cooler designs do.

May we presume the tested heatsinks didn't compromise the labels on either of the two SSDs? (It certainly doesn't appear so.) I know some of these manufacturers get a bit cranky if a drive is returned and the label isn't in pristine, factory-fresh condition.

Should have tested this bad boy. https://www.club386.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/HR-09-2280-PRO-1-696x580.jpg Yes that's a m.2 NVMe heatsink...

A bit curious, would you recommend using stock M2 heatsink plate that comes with some mobos? And another curious note, most if not nearly all SSDs have their label sticker on top side. To install the heatsink on top should/can we remove those label without voiding warranty?

babylon52281:

A bit curious, would you recommend using stock M2 heatsink plate that comes with some mobos? And another curious note, most if not nearly all SSDs have their label sticker on top side. To install the heatsink on top should/can we remove those label without voiding warranty?

The mobo heatsink looks to be just fine in the review. Many SSD labels are made to transfer heat from the small hot chip and out to the rest of the drive, the label is a metal foil and not just paper, so let the label stay on the drive. A SSD also only uses around 5 watts, so the heat is very limited.

TLD LARS:

The mobo heatsink looks to be just fine in the review. Many SSD labels are made to transfer heat from the small hot chip and out to the rest of the drive, the label is a metal foil and not just paper, so let the label stay on the drive. A SSD also only uses around 5 watts, so the heat is very limited.

Also the foil label warms the NAND memory chips with heat from the processor, Thats what its for, as well as cooling the processor a little. If the NAND run too cool they wear out faster. For this reason, dont put a water cooler on the NAND memory, only the processor. And leave the foil in place as LARS recommended.

The mobo heatsink is a big chunk of metal. But the more common mobo heatsink would be something like this: https://images.app.goo.gl/yjkudyBJWZ2tT4uu9 https://images.app.goo.gl/yjkudyBJWZ2tT4uu9 I wonder is this good enough. PS. Thanks for confirming to leave the label on.

babylon52281:

The mobo heatsink is a big chunk of metal. But the more common mobo heatsink would be something like this: https://images.app.goo.gl/yjkudyBJWZ2tT4uu9 https://images.app.goo.gl/yjkudyBJWZ2tT4uu9 I wonder is this good enough. PS. Thanks for confirming to leave the label on.

Look up what your temps are now. I am using a naked samsung 970 1 tb for games only, even in a sandwich between the GPU and CPU cooler, it is still only at 50-55 C. A fair bit of constant file transfer is needed for the chip to overheat. Also some SSDs do not even have enough high speed buffer storage to heat up the chip, before the SSD needs to switch over to the slower storage modules.

Thats something that I considered for long time, the position of the M.2 on my motherboard being in the middle of the GPU and CPU and how the hot air of this components can influence the NVME. I added the NVME temprature to the System Tray but is usually hovering 35ºº in Windows, only on a heavy worload of transfering a file can go above 45º. I'm going to add the NVME temperature to the RTSS to check during gaming. My case have a very good airflow so that helps too.

Great read! I really like articles like this, investigating the finer details of PC building that often get overlooked. My x570 board came with built-in heatsinks that seem to work well enough... I sporadically check my drive temps but it would be nice if I could get "Open Hardware Monitor" to log/graph the temps. OHM lists all my nvme drives as Generic Hard Disk and only shows available space. Perhaps a windows (11) setting.

0blivious:

I sporadically check my drive temps but it would be nice if I could get "Open Hardware Monitor" to log/graph the temps. OHM lists all my nvme drives as Generic Hard Disk and only shows available space. Perhaps a windows (11) setting.

Use HWinfo64 if you want NVMe temp monitoring ====================================================================================================================================== As for the article well what can I say not a lot it's pretty basic doesn't say anything about over cooling the nand can be bad for the life span of the drive or the fact that unless you're doing full on writes to your drive all the time then temps are pretty much irrelevant to total system temperature also the fact that it's much more important to keep the Controller cool than the nand so large chunky heatsinks (read Z690) that seriously lower the drives temps during reads is fine but during writes it's not so good to be doing that NAND likes to be hot when being written to just so long as it's not over hot so any mobo hs that keeps the drives nand between 50~75c during writes is perfectly acceptable

Athlonite:

Use HWinfo64 if you want NVMe temp monitoring ====================================================================================================================================== As for the article well what can I say not a lot it's pretty basic doesn't say anything about over cooling the nand can be bad for the life span of the drive or the fact that unless you're doing full on writes to your drive all the time then temps are pretty much irrelevant to total system temperature also the fact that it's much more important to keep the Controller cool than the nand so large chunky heatsinks (read Z690) that seriously lower the drives temps during reads is fine but during writes it's not so good to be doing that NAND likes to be hot when being written to just so long as it's not over hot so any mobo hs that keeps the drives nand between 50~75c during writes is perfectly acceptable

I found a handy tool for temp monitoring that can help in tricky situs. ie My 6700K based machine running Windows 7 is using the default Windows 7 NVME driver which practically all monitoring software doesnt even see. As far as they are concerned I dont have an NVME drive, that drive is missing. I use this driver because it runs significantly faster than drivers that provide more reporting features. Then I found Hard Disk Sentinel not only sees the drive but can read the temp and highest recorded temp as well. Great tool FYI

kakiharaFRS:

F I N A L L Y someone else says that a M.2 placed above the gpu is not good - after years telling people that 9/10 motherboards had awful design with the M.2 above the gpu or on it's side getting all the hot air (the only good one was the MSI TRX40 Creator who had two m.2 at the bottom of the motherboard and 1 vertically on the right of the ddr slots, all 3 away from heat sources and in places that had better airflow) - that the 5.0 M.2 from the latest asus Z690 extreme was the most stupid thing ever and was UNUSABLE (because not only does it kill your gpu bandwith, currently it divides it by 4x not 2x...4x !) but it means their stupid idiotic giant heatsink 1mm above the gpu backplate is actively HEATING your M.2 "who whould have guessed that placing a heat exchanger 1mm above a 80-100°C plate would not cool it...woaw I'm shocked !" (that's what you get when you claim to give useful info to consumers but keep using test benches because it makes YOUR job easier...but then all your measurements are trash because an open test bench is not a real computer aka a closed case) I'm afraid that's too late for the next AMD lineup because I noticed on the announcement they also looked like they had heatsinks almost touching the gpu, so another fake slot that you really shouldn't use, not like you want it anyway...see my rants on why pcie 5.0 is worst than 4.0 (you gain nothing but only lose more bandwith when the x16 is split between the pcie slots) maybe that's the reason why AMD went dual chipset...I hope so when they say : your pcie slot is x16 x8 x4 it's not : x of 5.0 speed it's : of whatever pcie speed your peripheral is so when your gpu pcie slot goes from 16x 5.0 (52Tb/s) down to x8 it's not x8 5.0 (26Tb/s) it's x8 4.0 at best which is 1/4 speed or x16 3.0 (13Tb/s) and yes you lose performance with high end videocards

Having recently changed to a vertically mounted gpu on an Msi b550m motar i have gained 2-3c at peak load on my Corsair mp600 pro xt and it still gets to the mid 50`s...which is above my gpu slot so heat from my gpu had very little impact.