The KryoM.2 looks like a good choice, but I'm not ready to throw out my Asus board and spend another $40. That's almost half what the drive cost! And the Gnome Tech seems to be totally unavailable at this time.
I can live with the temps, I was just curious about the degree of fluctuation at idle.
I might feel a bit ashamed about my mistakes for building the sig Skylake. Oh, it may be perfectly reasonable to buy a pair of items when you only need one. Then you have to organize and store a parts locker. Eventually, you will have to purge the locker even if the items are good, because not many would want them, and the cost of used-parts transactions exceeds a cost to convenience. Some of us would be great subjects to appear on the Cable-TV channel in "Hoarders" -- to our understandable embarrassment.
That being said, I lost a few ducats here and there, but those expansion cards only cost between $15 and $35. I can't even remember the make and model of the first I tried. I also bought an ASUS Hyper M.2, or whatever they call the one you also mention. I think it has LED pins. Then, I bought the KryoM.2 passive-heatsink model for a good reason: I was going to make a bigger-than-average investment in NVMe.
But I can still use the ASUS card. I have some contingency plans, ya see . . .
On the other side of the coin, the Kryo is especially good because of the heatsink size and the orientation: Even if low-profile cards are better for ventilating your graphics adapter, the higher-profile of the Kryo is also out of the way so that air is unfettered to travel through the graphic cooler fan.
Here's what I would do, though. It just shows how my mind is slowing down, because I wish I'd thought of it before pulling Checkout strings. I'm going across the room just to look again, but I think it would be fairly easy to jerry-rig a flat aluminum heatsink plate to the card, using the 2mm-thick blue pads, perhaps some wire ties. If I give myself a few hours, I can think of a lot of ways to do it that would be fairly neat and effective: You could "show" them.
The basic aluminum material I speak of can be had at the local metal shop in your town's industrial zone. It might be 3/8" or 1 cm high with stubby fins. You can trim and shape it with a dremel in minutes, because aluminum can be like butter. Just don't let the dremel blade stick or kick back. Use a light touch.
If, for instance, you cross-cut the fins perpendicular to their direction to create a slot through them, a wire tie might be just the thing -- perhaps -- a couple small wire ties. Pick your color. Purple is good; black is good; yellow and red too noticeable, but red might even provide some minor eye-candy.
You can also buy heatsinks at PC specialty shops online, but, again, the electronics jobber warehouse store next to the metals store might again be a place to look, and in fact -- it's true: I may have bought the basic 4"-wide by 10" long heatsink pieces at the electronics place next door to the metal shop.
A hacksaw is also quite handy. Perhaps -- a bench clamp.
You know -- I think that would be so-o-o easy. The biggest issue I foresee is the tension on the wire-ties. And the more I think of it, that shouldn't be so difficult to do right, either . . .
Maybe it depends on whether the x4 gold-plated edge connector is aligned with the only places you could run the strap around the board. I don't think that would be a problem, either.
Whadda any yas think about this? Let us confer . . .
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