960 evo cooling

[A1Mike_W]

I wanted to document my experiences with the 960 evo 500gb m.2 nvme, in case anyone else is ever in the same situation as I was. Specifically the overheating part.

 

I was overclocking my GPU and using hwinfo64 to document temperatures during gaming - scrolling down I noticed a temperature value in red, but it was under my SSD instead.

One of the temperatures was recording upwards of 85C, which didn't sit right with me as the average activity of the SSD was around 50%.

To clarify, there are two temperatures recorded in hwinfo64 for my 960 evo; temp 1 and temp 2. Temp 1 sat idle at 40-50C, which was fairly reasonable as these nvme's get pretty toasty. However, the temp 2 reading was 70 at IDLE.

I tried digging around to see what the reading was from, but I've yet to find anything. If I had a thermal imaging camera I could investigate, but I didn't think it was worth the effort. I've heard some say that temp 2 monitors the nand temps, but I cannot verify this so I'll just refer to it as temp 2 throughout. The SSD was getting ample airflow from being placed right under the CPU fan, so I didn't think that could be an issue.

Spoiler

Under load however, temp 1 hovered at a reasonable 50-56C, but temp 2 shot up to over 94C. The nvme did not thermal throttle when this was happening, which was even more alarming.

Spoiler

 

So I thought the best thing to do would be to buy a heatsink for my drive, which set me back about £10. I bought the EK m.2 heatsink, and after applying it the temperature difference was immediately apparent. I have no way of controlling the ambient temperature in my room, but I can read it; for the measurements for my m.2 with no heatsink it was 15C, and in the measurements with the heatsink it was 20C. Considering this, the small difference of 2C cooler on temp 1 with the heatsink on is more significant than it first seems, but the temp 2 reading is much more interesting:

 

Spoiler

I dropped 20C on idle temps, even with an ambient temperature rise of 5C. And, better yet, my temps under load were now what my idle temps were before applying the heatsink:

Spoiler

The seq read speeds dropped by 150mb/s but that's not something I'm likely to notice, and I would have no idea what caused this. Could be an error, but I checked twice more and it was consistent. If anyone has any idea what happened, let me know.

 

Anyway, this whole experiment was mostly because the specifications state the drive should not exceed 70C - since I had no warranty, I wanted to make sure the high temps would not affect the lifespan of it. Reaching 94C+ without throttling was concerning, and it looked like a specific part of the nvme was not being cooled properly since temp 1 readings remained *roughly* the same (the biggest difference was certainly with temp 2).