JRSC

There are 4 common types of nvme slot.  M key, B key B&M key and E key.  M key is nvme only, B key is SATA only, B&M can be either but often runs at sata speed, and E key is generally single lane and is for network cards.  It often sticks straight up. 
 
M key is what you got. It’s the fast one.  You could put a b&m card in it but it may be slow.  It won’t take B or E key

Yes, as it supports PCIe for the M.2 Slot it's NVME ready.

yeah they are build to handle it.
but the livetime of m.2 is reduced in high temp. (over 70) but it should throttle itself if high temp.
though very cheap "heatsink stickers" can be purchased to cool it a bit. but i would just have a bit of airflow over the disk and it should be fine.
 
 
copy from the spec list of the drive.
Operating Environment
Operating Temperature 0°C (32°F) ~ 70°C (158°F)

It will only affect itself. M.2NVMe drives need some form of cooling else they overheat and thermal throttle like any other component
 So if your SSD feels sloe, that's likely ehy

ohh btw during normal gaming operations the whole throttling shouldnt be a issue, isnt a sustained load. so temps shouldnt reach 70 during normal gaming
 

every electronic component will impact your thermals negatively.
but just because it can become 70 degrees doesnt mean it dissipates much heat to the air.
m.2 use between 200-600 miliWatt which alot of is transfered to heat. but that is next to nothing compared to CPU and GPU. (EDIT: which is in the category 100 watt give or take for cpu and gpu depending on model and OC offcourse.)
 
the reason for its high temp is because it doesnt transfer the heat anywhere is just heating up.

I would suggest looking at an undervolt/higher core clock option. This worked great for me. I cut about 10c off my max with a Ryzen 3600 from stock with better performance. I am not sure it will apply to an older CPU but I know that Ryzen doesn't need as much voltage as is provided at stock. I have my 3600 at 1.15v with a stable clock of 4.15 gz on all cores. I get better performance on Cinebench too!

Idle temps are irrelevant. If you want them lower, lower the room temp. 10C off room temp is ~10C off CPU temp.

Newsflash: The CPU DOESN'T CARE.
 
The CPU is designed to work up to 80-85 degrees Celsius and will safely function up to 90-100c (it will start to reduce frequency of some cores or shut down some cores above 80-85 degrees to cool down and will shut down if it goes close to 100c)
 
There's practically no benefit to keeping the CPU colder especially at idle, the CPU doesn't degrade* if it stays warm and doesn't
reduce its frequencies if it stays warm, it doesn't care. It will function perfectly fine, at the performance it's designed to have.
 
In fact, most motherboards bios will actually dynamically adjust the fan speed of cpu coolers to keep the noise as low as possible ... as long as the temperature is below some threshold like 60c for example, the motherboard will not make an effort to spin up the fan and reduce the temperature further, because spinning up would mean more noise.
 
So if you really want the cpu to pointlessly be colder, that's the first step you should do...go in bios and find cpu cooler options... maybe there's a fan curve or a fan profile ... see if it's set to "Silent" or "Normal" or "Default" ... maybe there's a "Performance" or "Aggressive" or "Fast" or "Gaming" profile for the fan, which forces the fan to run at higher speeds even at idle.
If you can edit the fan curve, adjust the fan curve to set the minimum rpm at a higher value.
Even on more basic motherboards, there may be an option to disable fan speed control in bios, or to set it at 100% all the time, and then cpu fan will run at 100% all the time.
If there's no way of forcing fan at higher speeds, you can also simply disconnect the 4th wire from the cpu fan connector, which is the pwm signal wire ... motherboard sends signal to the cpu fan through that wire, instructing to slow down or go faster, if the wire is disconnected the fan stays at 100% unless motherboard switches to adjusting voltage going to connector.
YOu can use a needle or paper clip to press on the metal locking bit of the wire to pull out the wire from the connector ... if you don't like it, you can always put the wire back in the connector.
 
These will make the cpu fan more noisy, but the cpu would be cooler.
 
After this, maybe most effect would be removing a case fan from the case and bringing it close  to the cpu and positioning it so that it blows air through the fins of the cpu cooler. Use zip ties or tape or even wires (in the past i've used wires from an ethernet cable to position a fan a couple cm above and to the side of a cpu cooler... wires were attached to cpu case corners and holding fan suspended in air.
More air through the fins of the heatsink will speed up dissipation of heat and will result in cpu being cooler. The other case fans will still eject the warmed up air from inside the case so that won't be an issue.
 
 
 
* heat does affect cpus but not by any significant amount worth mentioning, basically it would be something like this ... after running the cpu 24/7 at 70-80c, after 10+ years the cpu may only reach 4100 Mhz instead of 4150 Mhz or it may require a few mV increase in voltage (done automatically by the motherboard) and consume a watt or so more. Practically, the cpu is already in the landfill by the time degradation due to heat could be an issue.