For my next build I consider an Asus rog strix z690 A d4 mobo with two 980 pro 2 SSD’s. These are with or without heatsink. The mobo has cooled m2 slots. Wich version should I by? I have no idee wether the heatsinked versions do fit in the cooled m2 slots. Please advice me.
Go for the non heatsink versions as the motherboard will let you add a thermal pad for heat transfer nicely.
Its debateable if they are necessary, I have never found them to be but if you have them you may as well use them.
I just saw this article and video recently. It’s based on MSI, but they present a lot of good information/test results. Some of this should transfer to the hardware you are getting.
Ideally, if it is a good heatsink that properly cools the storage controller chip(s), then its definitely better to have one. Gamer’s Nexus did a video on it where they did some tests and they found out that the storage controllers on high speed M.2 drives will get hot and start to throttle down the transfer speed after like 30 seconds of continuous read/writes, without a heatsink. That being said, there’s plenty of heatsinks that are just slapped on the flash memory chips (Not the controller), and that doesn’t help you at all. They don’t get hot anyway, and running slightly warm is where they have the longest lifespan. It’s tough to find an M.2 with a heatsink that adequately cools the storage controller but if you do large read/writes over long periods of time, I would definitely recommend getting one. Burst read/writes wont notice much of a difference since the storage controller doesn’t have enough time to heat up in that case. I’d do some researching and see if you can find out about the quality of the heatsinks on the drives you’re planning on buying. They might help, they might not.
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Thanks a lot, you where of great help.
Thanks a lot.
Anytime hardware jebus gets out the heatgun and get frustrated by the results is a good Nexus vid. 