Review on 🔥 EKWB EK-M.2 NVMe Heatsink for Improved Cooling - Black by Mike Goodwin

I have one of the first motherboards to support M.2 NVMe SSDs, Gigabyte GA-Z170X-Gaming 3 rev. 1.0 On this board, the primary M.2 slot is next to the first PCIe slot and does not contain an M.2 heatsink. This means my Samsung 970 Evo Plus just lays bare under my graphics card, not exactly the right place to cool. At full synthetic load (the first two screenshots) without a heatsink, the flash memory itself heats up to 65 °C, and the controller to 83 °C. When the heatsink is installed according to the included instructions, everything looks a lot cooler; 52°C max for drive and 58°C max for controller. So a 13°C temperature drop on the flash itself and a significant 25°C temperature drop on the controller, all at the same fan speeds across the board (I used NZXT's hardware fan controller for the case fans and MSI Afterburner to set my to control ) GPU fans for these tests). The idle temperature on the NAND flash hasn't changed much, but the controller now runs 5-7°C cooler than before. While lowering the temperature doesn't make my drive noticeably faster, I suspect they extend the life of the drive by preventing the controller from cooking itself. Installing the heatsink was fairly easy, just cut the included thermal pads to length (making sure to place the thicker one on the top of the SSD and the thinner one on the bottom), line up the two halves and snap the clips into place . I didn't prematurely remove the stickers from the disc, it seemed like more trouble than it was worth. I would recommend using a small flathead screwdriver to fully seat the clips, it's a lot easier and safer than trying to force the clips a lot. On my motherboard, the heatsink was on the PCIe x1 slot, but I still managed to screw in the SSD. And, perhaps most importantly, my GPU still fits in its slot. My tests were done with ATTO Disk Benchmark and the timing was controlled with HWiNFO64, both of which are available for free.