Samsung 970 Evo Plus Cooling?

fastfishy2 · May 31, 2020

Hi,

Have bought the 1TB version of the above drive for my gaming setup to use solely as an ultra-fast storage space for games that would benefit the most from it (i.e. games like FO4, Skyrim, CIV 6 etc) while the others either go on my 860 Evo / boot drive, or my 2TB HDD. Basically it's being used as a super-fast gaming storage and the only times there will be much write to it is when I'm downloading / moving games to it.

I have read that the NAND controller on these drives can get quite warm and I want to avoid premature wear and/or throttling so I purchased the EKWB M.2 cooler for it. I did some research and realized that I might need to cut down the EKWB heatsink so that it only wraps around the controller part of the drive as the NAND does not need, and should not be, cooled.

What I'm wondering is:

1) For my above usage, am I likely to need any cooling improvements for the controller at all, or is it best to leave it as is? (My case airflow is very good as this has been a prime focus of mine)

2) If I do use the cut-down EKWB heatsink to cool the controller, what should I do with Samsung's sticker? Should I peel the whole thing off, or just cut off the part that goes over the NAND Controller and leave the rest that sticks over the NAND chips themselves?

I've never used NVMe M.2 drives before so this is all new to me. Any answers appreciated

Shimejii · May 31, 2020

you really should not have bought that gimicky ewkb crap. Your games swill not stress it at all.

LIGISTX · May 31, 2020

41 minutes ago, fastfishy2 said:

Hi,

Have bought the 1TB version of the above drive for my gaming setup to use solely as an ultra-fast storage space for games that would benefit the most from it (i.e. games like FO4, Skyrim, CIV 6 etc) while the others either go on my 860 Evo / boot drive, or my 2TB HDD. Basically it's being used as a super-fast gaming storage and the only times there will be much write to it is when I'm downloading / moving games to it.

I have read that the NAND controller on these drives can get quite warm and I want to avoid premature wear and/or throttling so I purchased the EKWB M.2 cooler for it. I did some research and realized that I might need to cut down the EKWB heatsink so that it only wraps around the controller part of the drive as the NAND does not need, and should not be, cooled.

What I'm wondering is:

1) For my above usage, am I likely to need any cooling improvements for the controller at all, or is it best to leave it as is? (My case airflow is very good as this has been a prime focus of mine)

2) If I do use the cut-down EKWB heatsink to cool the controller, what should I do with Samsung's sticker? Should I peel the whole thing off, or just cut off the part that goes over the NAND Controller and leave the rest that sticks over the NAND chips themselves?

I've never used NVMe M.2 drives before so this is all new to me. Any answers appreciated

What the post above me said is correct. The drive won't be under any stress, no need to cool it. Unfortunately, this drive likely won't make a lot of difference for game load times either. In all honesty, SSD's are SSD's. I run in different systems a single SATA III 840 evo, in another I have RAID 0 SATA III 830 Pro's (these are now my main systems gaming drive, RAID not for the speed, just for the increased space), and in my main I have an NVMe drive with games on it as well. I can confidently say I feel 0 difference between all of them.... NVMe is great, and if you are building a machine with it go for it, its affordable now and very convenient.

But, in all honest, it won't make much diff. NVMe is REALLY good in server usage because of the the high IOPS and huge bandwidth, but for "normal users" like most of us, its hard to really get the full use of them. That said, you already bought it, so definitely use it. But no need for cooling.