Hardware & Technical AlphaCool Passive and Actively Cooled M.2 PCI-E Add-In Cards

[GuruNot]

I have been contemplating moving my M.2 to an add-in card as my motherboard has the on-board M.2 under the GPU!! Which is not ideal from a thermal point of view.

Alphacool have recently launched two Cards , with with passive and the other with active cooling:

HDX-2 (Passive): https://www.alphacool.com/shop/-new...dapter-fuer-m.2-ngff-mit-passiv-kuehler-black

HDX-3 (Active): https://www.alphacool.com/shop/-new...adapter-fuer-m.2-ngff-mit-wasserkuehler-black

I am seriously thinking about the HDX-2, whilst it is an add in card. it looks like a far superior solution to EKWB's effort: https://www.ekwb.com/shop/water-blocks/ssd-blocks/m2-heatsinks.

Also, the add-in card is a good way for those without an M.2 slot to have an M.2 Drive

 

[Morbad]

Massive waste of money, if the goal is simply to improve M.2 temperatures.

A 5-10 euro stack of thermal pads placed between the motherboard and the underside of the SSD in proximity to it's controller is more than enough to make sure it will never throttle. SSDs don't produce much heat and the only reason they run hot is because there is no path for what they do make to escape. Replacing air with anything significantly more conductive will drop load temperatures considerably.

 

[Shadowdancer]

That really looks about as useful as coolers on RAM sticks.

If you have any amount of airflow through your case, you will not be running into issues. (So ironically the watercooling part makes some sick sense since those builds often forget about the base airflow and then people wonder why their systems break down when the power components derate.)

 

[Morbad]

If you have any amount of airflow through your case, you will not be running into issues.

To be fair, with the M.2 slot wedged under the GPU cooler, the M.2 drive gets almost no airflow with a GPU that has a blow cooler, and generally only very hot exhaust air with other coolers, irrespective of case airflow.

 

[Shadowdancer]

I miss the days when GPUs had exhaust coolers. But still, that's a location that any ATX-compliant case "should" cool enough to run solid-state ~5W loads.

Time to break out the K-type probe. (edit) Taped a thermocouple below the graphics card. Now to find something that heats the sucker

(edit 2) Room a bit above 25°C, ran OCCT burn test to heat my GPU to its thermal target of 70°C, ambient below it where some boards would place an M.2 plateaued at around 41.5°C after 10 minutes and eventually even dropped a bit, maybe from a bit of cooler air getting into the case. A Samsung 960 Evo is specced to run at up to 70°C ambient. So in this configuration, I wouldn't see any problems with just putting the device there.