Thermal Throttling

Due to the compact form factor, M.2 drives lack the ability to actively cool themselves, usually having to rely on passive airflow instead. All vendors include some form of thermal throttling on their drives as a safeguard, which limits throughput once a certain temperature is exceeded.

On this page, we will investigate whether the tested drive has such a mechanism, how high temperatures get, and what effect this has on performance. We will test the drive in a typical case, installed in the M.2 slot between the CPU and VGA card, while it's getting hammered by non-stop incoming writes. A first test run, to create a baseline, shows temperature and performance with a 120 mm fan directly blowing on the tested drive. In a second run we report thermal performance of the completely uncooled drive. Each of the charts has time moving from left to right, with the blue line displaying transfer speed in MB/s and the red line showing the temperature in degrees Celsius (measured using SMART).

Results from this test setup are not comparable to our older SSD benches because we're using a different case and an AIO watercooling unit, so there's very little airflow inside the case.

Bare Drive with Heat Spreader

Kingston ships their drive with a thin heat spreader preinstalled, so I ran our first test like that, without any additional airflow. As you can see, the drive throttles fairly quickly. On the other hand, if you have only light workloads that last for just a few seconds, then throttling won't be an issue.

Drive with Thermalright Heatsink

I also installed a Thermalright TR-M2, which is a compact full-metal heatsink. Still quite some throttling, but much better.

Drive with big Thermalright Heatsink

With the much bigger Thermalright HR-10, there is no more thermal throttling—which is an excellent result for a Gen 5 SSD.

Thermal Image & Hot Spot

We recorded a thermal image of the running SSD as it was completing the write test. The surface temperature of the drive reached 103°C. This is much higher than what we see on the Acer Predator GM9000 and suggests that Kingston picked a higher thermal limit. This is perfectly reasonable and perfectly safe, the chip is designed to run at high temperatures without issues.