M.2 drive cooling

[Odude18]

I'm just trying to decide a new mobo for my coffee lake chip, was planning on throwing an Samsung 960 Evo M.2 drive in there for booting up and storing often used applications, a mix of games and 3d modelling software, was probably going to go for the Asus Z370 Prime A or the ROG strix Z370-H but noticed the ROG doesn't have a M.2 heatspreader, how essential are they and unless doing heavy file transfer is my M.2 likely to thermal throttle without one.

[ARikozuM]

You don't need those covers for NVMe devices. The label on the 960 EVO has a thin copper film that dissipates heat from the drive.

[Guest]

Assuming a GPU isn't sitting on top of it, it'll be fine. I use 960s in several machines and have never experienced throttling outside of prolonged transfers. 

[Odude18]

Fair enough, they're only £12 so if for some reason i did have any issues it seems a reasonable solution but I would hope just basic application boots shouldn't subject it too strong loads over a long time so shouldn't get too hot

[Mira Yurizaki]

As an anecdotal testimony...

 

I'm running my NVMe drive behind the motherboard. The way my case is designed and the video card I use makes it so that the video card's hot air blows underneath the motherboard. So if I'm running a game, the NVMe drive will start to get toasty, sitting around 55C at worst. I've been doing this for at least a year with the current video card I have but I imagine that warming from the CPU has also caused it to get warm down there too. Either way, I'm seeing no issues with my SSD. The system's over two years old now as well.

 

If you're worried about thermal throttling, that's only a problem if you're hammering the SSD with something to do.

[just_dave]

Some Asus mobos have 3D Printable fan mounts, so you can cool the M.2