Installing new M2 tonight. Use heat sink?

The kit I've bought comes with a heat sink and thermal pad and clips, but Samsung says, "Samsung’s Dynamic Thermal Guard automatically monitors and maintains optimal operating temperatures to minimize performance drops." It's a 970 EVO Plus 250GB. I'll just be using it for the OS and programs, and no games at all.

Use or not use a heat sink? How say you?

If it came with one, why would you not use it (assuming it will physically fit in the space the SSD is being mounted in)? The only way to control temperature with firmware in the drive is to throttle the drive controller.

If you've got the room then I'd use it.

Does your opinion change if you know it's a PCIe3 x4 M2? And it doesn't install under my GPU, so it will get air, but my Lenovo M920S SFF box has no case fans; just the CPU fan and the PSU fan, so there's not a huge airflow.

I've got three NVMe drives in various USB enclosures (All Samsungs PCIe3 x4) and only one came with a thermal pad and that's the one that runs the coolest when Verifying with Macrium. Runs under 70C while the others run just above.

Where every possible use the heatsink....Things must run as cool as possible (have you ever been in a mainframe room without gloves )

Okay, I have 3 yes's and no no's, so I'm going with the sink and marking this "solved." Thank you all. (Whoops, I just discovered that I can't do that on this forum. OK.)

And @The-Hive: You bet I've been there -- many times, years ago, when my workplace had a huge mainframe and a LOT of dumb terminals -- and I remember it well ... Brrrrrrrrrrr! And the workroom where I had to work at the card-keypunch machine occasionally (remember keypunchers?) was in the next room, and always cold because of its proximity to the "cold room."

Use it.

Note that the computers you have require a black plastic part to be installed first:

Does your motherboard have it's own heatsinks?

For the ThinkCentre 920S SFF, it looks like the computer also comes with its own heatsink for the SSD, it is shown at 1:20 into this vid:

hdmi said:

Note that the computers you have require a black plastic part to be installed first:

Click to expand...

Yahbut, nobody has that part in stock, not even Lenovo, so I'm going with an install with an M2 PCIe NVMe 4.0/3.0 adapter with heat sink, for PCIe x4 installation. And that gynormous heat sink in the video is MIA in my box, and doesn't show up in the manual. I think you had to order the M2 from the factory in order to get that heat sink installed. The M2 was an option from the factory, but with 2 SATA SSD/HDD bays, I don't think they'd have spent the $$$ to install the sinks as a matter of course. Most people wouldn't add an M2.

Only way to get that part (4XF0U53614) is to get it directly from China. Everybody else is backordered.

...Or just superglue a nylon spacer into the PC case. lol

Wisewiz said:

Does your opinion change if you know it's a PCIe3 x4 M2? And it doesn't install under my GPU, so it will get air, but my Lenovo M920S SFF box has no case fans; just the CPU fan and the PSU fan, so there's not a huge airflow.

Click to expand...

doesnt it have 2 fans in addition to the cpu two fans

aux fan connector:

SIW2 said:

doesnt it have 2 fans in addition to the cpu two fans

Click to expand...

Those look like they are added Noctua fans.

hdmi said:

Those look like they are added Noctua fans.

Click to expand...

The point is that there is an aux fan connector on the mobo.

Use the heat sink , you can't go wrong.

You can run without it but your ssd will run warmer than normal and you will notice a step down in performance when putting a load on it without the heat sink, I tried running without one with mine and I noticed it ran at around 60 degrees Celsius which is still within limits, with the heat sink installed it now runs at 42 degrees Celsius ...... nice and cool

Icy Box heat sink with a fan, The Best $20 I ever spent .........

SIW2 said:

The point is that there is an aux fan connector on the mobo.

Click to expand...

Yeah, but if he is going to put an M.2 PCIe NVMe 4.0/3.0 adapter card in the PCIe x4 slot, then there might not be enough clearance to add the fans onto the GPU.