NVMe heat sinks, worth it or overkill?

katie279

katie279

katie279

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Hi all, seen a few of these ranging from stick on heat sinks to fully fledged fan mounts. Do NVMe drives actually get that hot and is it worth getting these or is it just for overclocking etc?
 
Unless you're hammering drive with long continuous workloads, they aren't really needed.
Typical home use like gaming just doesn't stress drives enough.

Though of course also ambient temperature inside the case affects to temperature they reach.
 
It's unlikely you will need one for the flash chips on an NVMe but it could be worthwhile having one just contacting the controller chip which gets hot and could throttle under heavy load if it gets above 80 degrees generally though that depends on the drive itself and a combination of case airflow. Most slots on the mobo are directly above the GFX card which generates loads of heat so controller cooling might be beneficial even if it's just a basic heatsink covering that part.

You don't want teh flash chips running too cool anyway as flash memory operates more efficiently/reliably when warm to warm,-hot.
 
Not really required as some boards have their own and the sticker on the drives themselves work as a heatsink.
 
Well I feel an experiment / test coming up! As relatively cheap I'll do a test to see how much of a difference it makes!
 
katie279 said:
Well I feel an experiment / test coming up! As relatively cheap I'll do a test to see how much of a difference it makes!
Click to expand...
Remember that quite many of those heatsinks work only with one sided M.2 drives.
(can have components only on one side of PCB)

BeQuiet is one of the few with known compatibility also with double side drives.
be quiet! MC1 M.2 SSD Cooler= £9.95
 
The ones that come with motherboards don't do a great deal.

I had a 980 pro and used the motherboard one and it made minimal differences to temps.

The NVMe drives that come with their own heatsinks like the Firecuda 530 and MP600 Pro XT etc do actually reduces temps.

If you want a heatsink I'd buy a drive that ahs one, as opposed to buying third party ones or using motherboard ones.
 
Jay343434 said:
If you want a heatsink I'd buy a drive that ahs one
Click to expand...

This makes sense to me. Especially if you can get one with a heatsink built in at little extra cost.

Can't they build high spec NVME drives that don't thermal throttle?

Gonna need to advise my dad this year about whether these drives are worth it (vs SATA).
 
g67575 said:
Can't they build high spec NVME drives that don't thermal throttle?

Gonna need to advise my dad this year about whether these drives are worth it (vs SATA).
Click to expand...
Controllers of high end drives are hot running chips when fully loaded.
Only way to avoid throttling at continuous load would be hard capping heat output (=performance) to one which can be dissipated without extra cooling.

For gaming PC wouldn't bother with SATA.
Anyway SATA SSDs aren't even cheaper.
 
I didn't bother with one on my previous Samsung 960 EVO 250GB but my WD Black SN750 2TB was running much warmer, so I bought a £10 heatsink off Amazon just to help it catch more airflow. It doesn't make a massive difference but it keeps the drive below 50 degrees for the most part.
 
It depends on the drive, some run much cooler than others. For instance the Western Digital SN850 runs extremely hot, you don't want to run it without a heatsink, whereas the Seagate Firecuda 530 runs cool and you could probably get away without one.
 
I found that a decent heatsink drops the temps quite a lot. On my previous build I had a pair of Samsung 970 Evo Pro M2 drives, one of which was under the Gigabyte Z390 Aorus Pro's stock M2 heatsink and one which had no heatsink. The one with no heatsink suffered from thermal throttling as the controller was running extremely hot while the other was hitting 38 degrees max under the motherboard M2 heatsink. I bought a couple of basic M2 heatsinks on Amazon which was less than a fiver for a pack of four. They came with thermal tape but I actually used 0.5mm thermal pads and used cable ties to fix the heatsink to the drives. The pair of drives were now hitting a max of 33 degrees. In my current build I found that my Adata XPG S70 Gammix Blade was thermal throttling under my MSI Z690 Edge's stock M2 heatsinks. I found this strange as they are very large on this board. When I removed the heatsinks to check the drives I found that the thermal pads on the heatsinks are barely making contact with either of my drives. Back to Amazon and I ordered a pair of "clamshell" type heatsinks that cool both the top and bottom of the drives for just under £12. I didn't use the thermal pads that came with them and used the 0.5mm sheets I already had. The Samsung drive runs at a max of 28 degrees C while the Adata (Gen 4) is hitting 39 degrees C in normal use/gaming. I have a pair of 200mm intake fans and another pair of 200mm exhaust fans blowing straight across the motherboard which helps massively with cooling but personally I wouldn't run a M2 drive without any heatsink. (Max temps are the controller temps.)
 
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