Question Is Nvme overheating a overrated issue? Interested in one

[mopardude87]

Thinking i finally wanna ditch my ssds for a single nvme, a 1tb Sammy 970 Evo should have me set for prob 3 years as i don't use all that much space. I keep seeing heatsinks and stuff and was curious how blown out of proportion this is? I will be swapping out my Antec 900 for Cooler Master H500p Mesh and modding it with no honeycomb cover on fan spot on back or front filter for maximum efficiency. Obviously if i ramp up the rear fan with like a 110 cfm model i have already heat should not be a issue.

So with that case and mods in mind, is nvme overheating even gonna be a issue? Its mainly going to be a gaming rig but who knows,i need to make sure this guy can take the abuse!

 

[thecoolnessrune]

M.2 SSDs can and will throttle under heavy sustained use, but are otherwise more than properly designed to perform without issue under the use cases they are designed for. A 970 EVO is a general home use SSD and will be just fine supporting the intermittent workloads of gaming duty. High, sustained use (such as transferring 100's of Gigabytes in one go) can get temps up high enough to throttle, but this should not be a common, or meaningful use case. If your common use case involved transferring nearly the full capacity of the SSD back and forth regularly, you should look into a Commercial focused SSD, and switch to a 2.5" form factor that has more mass to dissipate heat into.

 

[Charlie98]

I started a thread on this a month or so ago... there are 2 schools of thought. Basically, if you are just using it in general PC use, it'll be fine without a sink. Mine runs in the low 40's, which was alarming at first, but I understand now is pretty normal.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

Mine runs in the low 40's, which was alarming at first, but I understand now is pretty normal.

Anything under 60C is perfectly acceptable for an IC. It's really only once you get above 80C there is cause for concern.

Now, if you had a spinning rust drive running at 60C, that'd be cause for concern. Might need some additional airflow.

 

[mopardude87]

M.2 SSDs can and will throttle under heavy sustained use, but are otherwise more than properly designed to perform without issue under the use cases they are designed for. A 970 EVO is a general home use SSD and will be just fine supporting the intermittent workloads of gaming duty. High, sustained use (such as transferring 100's of Gigabytes in one go) can get temps up high enough to throttle, but this should not be a common, or meaningful use case. If your common use case involved transferring nearly the full capacity of the SSD back and forth regularly, you should look into a Commercial focused SSD, and switch to a 2.5" form factor that has more mass to dissipate heat into.

I do none of this, i simply install/uninstall games play them and do basic browsing/youtube/facebook. Its almost like i don't need one but idk i hate bottlenecks and always value the best if i could afford. Also gonna be a cleaner build if i don't got one more cable plugged into my psu sending out a string of sata connections for a single dang 1tb ssd for example.

Friend always ranting about the overheating too,i figured with a modified H500P Mesh this should not be a issue.

 

[ArisVer]

I can only add that while transferring 100GB of files on my less than half filled 1TB Intel 660p, the last 50GB dropped to 90MBps then even further down to 60MBps. I was not checking temps, but it should have been due to throttling or cache. The last files were all ISOs, and I did not install a heatsink (yet).

 

[UsandThem]

I can only add that while transferring 100GB of files on my less than half filled 1TB Intel 660p, the last 50GB dropped to 90MBps then even further down to 60MBps. I was not checking temps, but it should have been due to throttling or cache. The last files were all ISOs, and I did not install a heatsink (yet).

That was likely because of the size of the SLC cache becoming full, and the rest being forced to write to the QLC NAND instead of it overheating and throttling.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/13078/the-intel-ssd-660p-ssd-review-qlc-nand-arrives/9

Even though our synthetic tests are designed to give drives a reasonable amount of idle time to flush their SLC write caches, the 660p keeps most of the data as SLC until the capacity of QLC becomes necessary. This means that when the SLC cache does eventually fill up, there's a large backlog of work to be done migrating data in to QLC blocks. We haven't yet quantified how quickly the 660p can fold the data from the SLC cache into QLC during idle times, but it clearly isn't enough to keep pace with our current test configurations. It also appears that most or all of the tests that were run after filling the drive up to 100% did not give the 660p enough idle time after the fill operation to complete its background cleanup work, so even some of the read performance measurements for the full-drive test runs suffer the consequences of filling up the SLC write cache.

In the real world, it is very rare for a consumer drive to need to accept tens or hundreds of GB of writes without interruption. Even the installation of a very large video game can mostly fit within the SLC cache of the 1TB 660p when the drive is not too full, and the steady-state write performance is pretty close to the highest rate data can be streamed into a computer over gigabit Ethernet. When copying huge amounts of data off of another SSD or sufficiently fast hard drive(s) it is possible to approach the worst-case performance our benchmarks have revealed, but those kind of jobs already last long enough that the user will take a coffee break while waiting.

 

[WelshBloke]

I have a 970 EVO+ in an asus X470 prime pro motherboard. The cpu is cooled by a closed loop water cooler so theres not a massive amount of airflow over the EVO but it manages fine.

 

[mopardude87]

Sounding more shifty and unpredictable to me, why aren't these delivering with default heatsinks? Perhaps i will just stick to what i got idk. Not a huge thing i HAVE to have but geez such a finicky thing. Its been on my mind though that's for dang sure.

I might pay a premium for one with a heatsink and no non sense but apparently the 970 is just to unpredictable for me. My usage could change and if it does then i am sitting here with throttling "trash" so to speak. I like knowing if my usage changes then this thing is good for anything. Like people defending cheap coolers on a 9900k for gaming it mind as well be the same damn thing. Oh its fine for gaming but wait till you load up those cores.

 

[UsandThem]

Sounding more shifty and unpredictable to me, why aren't these delivering with default heatsinks? Perhaps i will just stick to what i got idk. Not a huge thing i HAVE to have but geez such a finicky thing. Its been on my mind though that's for dang sure.

I might pay a premium for one with a heatsink and no non sense but apparently the 970 is just to unpredictable for me. My usage could change and if it does then i am sitting here with throttling "trash" so to speak. I like knowing if my usage changes then this thing is good for anything. Like people defending cheap coolers on a 9900k for gaming it mind as well be the same damn thing. Oh its fine for gaming but wait till you load up those cores.

If you're concerned about the temps, just buy a cheap $10 - $15 cooler for it. They aren't necessary for most people, but since coolers are so inexpensive for them, just get one.

I have one on my 970 EVO Plus (SilverStone) and WD Black NVMe (integrated motherboard one) drives, while I don't have one on my MyDigitalSSD SBX or Intel 660P drives.

 

[thecoolnessrune]

Sounding more shifty and unpredictable to me, why aren't these delivering with default heatsinks? Perhaps i will just stick to what i got idk. Not a huge thing i HAVE to have but geez such a finicky thing. Its been on my mind though that's for dang sure.

I might pay a premium for one with a heatsink and no non sense but apparently the 970 is just to unpredictable for me. My usage could change and if it does then i am sitting here with throttling "trash" so to speak. I like knowing if my usage changes then this thing is good for anything. Like people defending cheap coolers on a 9900k for gaming it mind as well be the same damn thing. Oh its fine for gaming but wait till you load up those cores.

I can say with confidence there's absolutely nothing shifty about the SSDs. Their performance constraints are established. M.2 was never designed to be a constant, high performance design. It was designed primarily to be a small form factor for solid state media, and in that regard makes great success in laptops and as boot and metadata SSD's in Servers, where they're rapidly replacing USB drives, SD Cards, and the RAID 1 HDD setups of the past.

M.2 devices do not come with heatsinks because the M.2 specification itself only allows a thickness a bit below 4mm (1.5mm each side plus a 0.8mm board thickness). Again, this standard was designed mainly around size constraints, not performance constraints.

For the intermittent usage of home environments, these constraints do not present a problem. If you go beyond the constraints of your average home user, then just like the boost clocks of a CPU, that's an entirely different discussion.

As an SSD for Game Storage, you are not going to see any problems. That is a very low-intensity use case.

 

[mopardude87]

If you're concerned about the temps, just buy a cheap $10 - $15 cooler for it. They aren't necessary for most people, but since coolers are so inexpensive for them, just get one.

I have one on my 970 EVO Plus (SilverStone) and WD Black NVMe (integrated motherboard one) drives, while I don't have one on my MyDigitalSSD SBX or Intel 660P drives.

Any link by chance for one perhaps the one you got? Max performance obviously is what i want especially given i am planning to purchase and mod one heck of a wind tunnel case. During summers, my place stays prob closer to 80 i get cold easy so it does warm up a bit here. Its the reasoning for the wind tunnel and the works. Plus i am anal about my temps. I leave nothing to chance in that regard.

I figured a heatsink may be needed but wasn't sure if i move the nvme or anything that it would present a issue. Going Comet Lake/Ryzen 4000 series this year prob 4000 series or which ever delivers the most frames in games so will want to move this thing. $15 for a heaksink isn't a issue but i am sorta a set and forget person so hoping any of these heatsinks don't need constant tinkering or whatever. The nvme while i know is awesome in performance,i got no idea about the clearance to lets say a triple slot video card for example if i get one.

Edit: top slot is above the top pci-e slot on current motherboard so i guess anything would work. Its just when i move it, haven't focused much on nvme but now got a major interest in getting one.

 

[UsandThem]

Any link by chance for one perhaps the one you got? Max performance obviously is what i want especially given i am planning to purchase and mod one heck of a wind tunnel case. During summers, my place stays prob closer to 80 i get cold easy so it does warm up a bit here. Its the reasoning for the wind tunnel and the works. Plus i am anal about my temps. I leave nothing to chance in that regard.

This is the one I use on the 970 EVO Plus: https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B07B6BB4PZ

On the plus side, it works great. However, when I first installed it, one of the silicone bands snapped, so I had to use some electrical tape to secure one side. It's still working great till today.

 

[Steltek]

I wouldn't worry too much about it for normal operation.

The simple fact of the matter is that the flash memory itself is rated to operate by JDEC at 40C or higher. Cooling it to below 40C and writing to it actually is much more wearing on the flash memory (the colder it is, the more it reduces its write longevity -- by potentially up to as much as half by writing to it at say room temperature up to 40C).

For moderate use cases, cool the NVMe controller. If you need constant high-volume writes and find it is getting too hot and throttling, you can apply a heatsink or TIM strip.

The bad thing about NVMe slots is the motherboard placement exacerbates the issue, especially on cheap boards where they tend to drop them right underneath a PCIe slot (sometimes even right under the video card, the worst place it could be).

 

[mopardude87]

This is the one I use on the 970 EVO Plus: https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B07B6BB4PZ

On the plus side, it works great. However, when I first installed it, one of the silicone bands snapped, so I had to use some electrical tape to secure one side. It's still working great till today.

Doesn't look bad at all, i assume the blue strips in the picture are some sort of thermal pad to transfer heat? I just remembered that the Gigabyte x570 boards have their heatsinks as well so if i get this nvme i could just apply the motherboards nvme heatsink to the deal as well. I made a decision to see and wait what Comet Lake and 4000 series can deliver and whichever offers the best 8c/16t option for gaming. Cyberpunk 2077 MAY get me upgrading to either 3000 series or Comet assuming the human malware situation does not push it further like Ampere. I care about maximum fps at this point and whatever option allows me to cool on air will get my money. Currently the 7700k is more then enough for me but will see. Not buying on impulse i wanna plan this build.

Depending on platform choice,i will prob opt for a 4.0 version of a nvme. Pretty hyped, going all out on a build for the first time since 2009. Gonna prob take all dang year to do it but currently the 7700k/1080ti/1080p freesync set up is beyond perfect. Prob will be crushed by 2021 titles but currently the game selection is absolute trash to me so yeah i could wait till something is worth upgrading to as well.

Thank you very much for all the help bud, i bookmarked your heatsink just in case i just opt for B450 Tomahawk Max and 3700x as it even matches the motherboard! Good pickings sir!