If these days you would like to buy a really fast SSD you’re going to choose a M.2 drive. Those drives are not just fast some of them also struggle with overheating issues. A few months ago, MSI introduced the M.2 Shield which is supposed to help keeping the temperatures low. MSI has now announced their latest M.2 cooling solution, which integrates a large M.2 heatsink into the chipset heatsink of your motherboard.

At this time it’s still unknown how this heatsink works but we believe that it will be made from aluminum like the predecessor. According to the image, the heatsink might be linked to a heatsink on the motherboard. This would mean that if you had to remove the M.2 SSD, would also have to remove the graphics card and the chipset heatsink. The heatspreader is supposed to feature thermal pads on the underside, which should help in evenly removing heat from the SSD. Therefore MSI claims that this new heat spreader is capable of keeping the temperatures low and as a result reduce throttling on M.2 PCIe SSDs.

If you’re thinking about buying an M.2 SSD or if you already own one, you might be aware of the throttling issues these drives can face. A few months ago the guys on pugetsystems.com composed an interesting article regarding throttling issues on a Samsung 950 M.2 drive, which they’ve put under heavy workload using three different motherboards. According to their findings a small heatspreader can already be enough to prevent M.2 drives from throttling.

According to MSI, they’re going to bundle this heatsink with their upcoming MSI X370 Gaming M7 motherboard, which they’ve announced yesterday and packs two M.2 slots.




Source: OC3D