m.2 drives, with heatsink or use motherboard heatsink?

[GoogalyMoogaly]

So when planning my new build I've been looking at motherboard with built-in m.2 heatsinks and then pricing up m.2 drives with no heatsink. But when looking at slightly cheaper motherboards of a different brand I noticed some of them don't have heatsinks for all the m.2 slots. I guess in this case you'd have to buy m.2 drives with a built-in heatsink. Initially I didn't like this idea, but I'm now wondering about it as a possability, not just for the slot without a heatsink but for all the m.2 drives.

What do you guys tend to do, get m.2 drives without heatsinks and use the motherboard heatsinks or buy m.2 drives with heatsinks (and not use the motherboard ones)?

As I see it the pros for using the motherboard heatsinks are:

• m.2 drives are a bit cheaper without heatsinks
• bigger heatsinks in theory should cool better?
• looks nicer

And the pros for using m.2 drives with built-in heatsinks are:

• much easier to remove/change as you don't have to worry about the thermal pad sticking to the drive.
• being built-in the heatsink might be attached in a more efficient way than a generic thermal pad and so might be more effective (thus countering the smaller size)

 

[mrk]

You can buy higher quality thermal pads anyway such as Thermal Grizzly, so you benefit even more from better heat transfer. but yeah a bigger heatsink has a bigger heatpipe setup so can vent heat better than just a flat standard heatsink, though any heatsink with a thermal pad is better than none if the NVMe drive is of high performance. For a normal NVMe drive under normal conditions you won't see much difference in performance assuming your case cooling is decent and the generic area of the SSD is getting airflow, but with modern GPUs, that whole area will be diluted with hot air anyway when gaming, so it's probably more ideal to have a heatsink to help.

From my experience, I have currently the Sabrent big "gaming" heatsink with the included thermal pad installed. I have used the same SSD with the mobo's heatsink and a Thermal Grizzly pad, the Sabrent heatsink which is big, gets a few degrees lower temps all round but it's not night and day, for reference.

Get whatever solution combines the best of cost effectiveness and aesthetics for your build.

 

[lsg1r]

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You missed a negative... bigger heatsinks could cause fit issues with things like you gpu if placed under it.

I've got built in heatsinks on mine, only one of my board slots had a heatsink, and they're so close to catching the gpu above it. I wouldn't necessarily say they cool better either, in my case one (o11 evo), my drive under the gpu is actually cooler than the one above it, it just has better access to the air coming from the bottom of the case. So I'd argue that location and access to moving air is far more important than the heatsink itself, at least with gen4.