SSD Temperatures

Early indications were for somewhat poor performance from the single M.2 heatsink, but it actually performed reasonably well. Despite lacking underside cooling, it managed to just about tame our double-sided PCIe Gen 5 SSD, keeping it at 78°C, which would be much lower in a well-cooled system instead of our minimal airflow test rig. Still, a single-sided PCIe Gen 5 SSD is recommended. We've yet to see a motherboard heatsink fail at cooling our current PCIe Gen 4 SSD, but the result was still decent, even if it was some way off the best result achieved by this board's big brother, the ROG Crosshair X870E Glacial at 51°C versus 41°C. Only the MSI MPG B850I Edge Ti Wi-Fi and its fan-assisted M.2 heatsink managed better results with our PCIe Gen 5 SSD as far as B850 Mini-ITX boards go.

PCIe Gen 4 Performance (Samsung 990 Pro)

PCIe Gen 5 Performance (Team Group T-Force Z540)