If these days you’d like to buy a really fast SSD you’re going to choose an M.2 drive. Those drives are not just fast some of them also struggle with overheating issues. Already a few months ago, MSI has introduced their M.2 shield which is supposed to help keeping the temperatures low. Meanwhile Gigabyte has come up with a similar heatsink which goes by the name M.2 Thermal Guard.


With their Thermal Guard, Gigabyte has an aluminum heatspreader in its portfolio which is compatible with M.2-2280 slots. On one side the heatspreader features non-conductive thermal padding, which should help in evenly removing heat from the SSD. Therefore Gigabyte claims that this new heatspreader 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.

So far Gigabyte has not revealed details on pricing and availability of their so called M.2 Thermal Guard. Since this is basically just a small piece of aluminum and very cheap to manufacture, we’d guess that it will soon be bundled with Gigabyte motherboards.




Source: Gigabyte Twitter