Are your motherboard's M.2 heatsinks making good contact with your SSD? We tested 20 modern Intel and AMD motherboards to verify
M.2 SSDs, especially PCIe 5.0 models, produce significant heat that can cause thermal throttling if not properly cooled. Tom’s Hardware tested the primary M.2 heatsink on 20 recent Intel and AMD motherboards and found that many do not make good contact with the drive. Inadequate contact leads to reduced transfer speeds and performance loss during sustained workloads.
- ▪M.2 SSDs have become the dominant storage medium in PCs, but their higher speeds generate more heat than older drives.
- ▪Motherboard‑integrated M.2 heatsinks vary in size and design, and effective cooling depends on mass, surface area, and thermal‑pad quality.
- ▪The testing showed that a notable number of the 20 motherboards examined failed to achieve solid contact between the heatsink and the SSD.
- ▪Poor heatsink contact caused the test PCIe 5.0 SSD to throttle dramatically, dropping from near 4,000 MB/s to as low as 600 MB/s.
- ▪Thermal throttling can severely impact workflow efficiency, turning fast SSD performance into speeds comparable to older SATA drives.
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| Publication time | Thu, 30 Jul 2026 11:23:44 +0000 |
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PC Components Motherboards Are your motherboard's M.2 heatsinks making good contact with your SSD? We tested 20 modern Intel and AMD motherboards to verify News By Joe Shields Published 30 July 2026 Heatsink contact is a key to good M.2 cooling When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. (Image credit: Tom's Hardware) Copy link Facebook X Whatsapp Reddit Pinterest Flipboard Email Share this article 0 Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter M.2-based SSDs have been around for about a decade now in PCs, and have all but replaced the much larger and notably slower 3.5-inch hard drives, and even 2.5-inch drives, both spinners and SSDs.
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