I’m building a new PC and bought an ASRock B365 Pro4 and WDS250G2X0C (the small WD Black that comes without heat spreader. Now this motherboard has its own heat spreader over one of its 2 M.2 slots that they call “M.2 Armor” and I’m wondering if I should put the SSD under that or use the “open air” slot instead.
The motherboard heat spreader is made from aluminum and has some sort of rubber as contact material. The WD NVMe has a sticker on top though, so it was probably not designed to be used with an external heat sink. Yet I’m wondering what’s the better option in terms of longevity and or performance.
Thanks in advance!
(The red circle is where the heat spreader goes. The right side shows the the WD black currently seated in the second M.2 NVMe slot.)
As for the sticker on the SSD, unless you made your purchase in the USA and benefit from last year’s FTC ruling you will lose your warranty the moment you remove it and some retailers will also state so in the fine print. So the decision is yours, but as a EU citizen I must leave it on no matter how it conducts heat.
With 32°C to 50°C depending on CPU/GPU load with the SSD mostly idle, it is right where I wanted it to be now. At this point I don’t know how I would really heat the NVMe up to critical levels. I have no other SSD to copy from or to and everything else I do doesn’t include gigabytes of sequential reads/writes. Even video games don’t load enough assets at once: considering that (V)RAM is limited it’s going to be maybe 12 GiB, which would be done in 4 seconds. So I’m mostly worried about it getting too cold for now. And there could be no cozier place for it than right between GPU and CPU!
