Motherboard heatsinks for NVMEs

.Griff.

.Griff.

.Griff.

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Please accept my apologies if the following question is stupid.

I'm in the process of building my next rig using a mini ITX motherboard (ROG Strix B650E-I)

Like a lot of motherboards, it has a couple of M.2 slots - One is on the front underneath a fairly chunky heatsink and thermal pad and the other is on the rear. Albeit the one on the rear has no such heatsink.

So my naive/daft question is this - The presence of the heatsink/thermal pad on the front of the board suggests that NVMEs get hot and require cooling. If that assumption is correct then is there any risk of using a second NVME on the back of the board when there's no such cooling in place?

Again, I'm sorry if it's a silly question. We all have to learn from somewhere.
 
Nvme m2 drives do not require cooling they just help to lower temperatures as they can run hot if you moving a lot of data for long periods of time .

High temps can lower performance so you could add one to the rear if you prefer but aftermarket coolers can invalidate warranty.
 
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I've used the nvme slot on the rear of an itx mobo before. Would not recommend for constant SSD use. The ssd will get up to 65c and throttle during heavy I/o operation.
Mine at the time was the WD black sn750 pcie3. No heatsink. A thin heatsink may help but Ive never tested it
 
Cheers both.

I intend to use my main 2TB NVME on the front of the board under the heatsink but based on what you're saying I should be able to put my spare 512GB NVME to use on the rear albeit it will only be used sporadically for some extra storage. I assume that would be ok?
 
I've run pcie 4 NVME without any heat sink no problems. A lot of it depends if the case has good cooling. Pcie 5 is inadvisable though without a heatsink as they run way hotter
 
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