Investigation: thermals vs performance in adata SX8000

[dany_boy]

Hello internauts:

So recently I got myself an Adata SX8000 256GB NVME SSD (wow that's a lot of acronyms!). Before I installed OS and all other essentials, I decided to test its performance while it was still clean and new. I noticed that HW monitor was picking up some fairly high temps in the SSD (69°C), even while idle. After probing around with an IR thermometer, I discovered that the cache and memory were running at a healthy ~45°C, while the shiny controller was running at the  aforementioned 69°C. While I know its within safe limits, I was wondering if that was impacting performance in some way. therefore I decided to do a little experiment by placing a small heatsink on the controller chip.

 

I cut a section of a small aluminum heat sink I had laying around to match the dimensions of the controller. I wet sanded the bottom of the heatsink with a progressive grit increase until I got to 1200. Finally I proceeded to put some thermal compound between the chip and the heatsink and took it for a spin.

 

The test were conducted with an ambient of 20.2°C according to my IR thermometer's calibration reading (using a thermistor). Both test were conducted within 20 minutes of each other. For both the system was allowed to rest for 10 minutes powered down. I was only running spy-bot SD at startup. The results are as follows: (left without heatsink and right with heatsink)

The huge difference in the lows is probably caused by the extra mass of the heatsink, as it takes longer for it to heat up when starting the system cold. The max temps occurred when the drive was under test, and the temperature displayed as "value" was registered 5 minutes after the tests were conducted and are representative of idle temps. As you can see, there is a marginal improvement with the heatsink, both in terms of temps and performance. For sequential reads, the gains are 1.4%, for writes the improvements go up resulting in a 11.9% improvement. For 4K reads and writes the improvements are 0.05% and 0.1% respectively. In terms of thermals, the max is the same while the idle temps improve by 3.1%.

 

Thanks for reading, should you have any questions I will gladly answer them. Also let me know if you think I should make this a permanent mod (use thermal adhesive instead of  thermal grease).

Cheers!

[dany_boy]

Yes, the performance and thermal improvements are indeed marginal. I tried to look up the warranty for the SX8000 but have not found anything. I guess it'll depend on that. 

Cheers!