Z97 Pro4 and GPU heating?

longbowman wrote: Hi folks, I have an ASRock Pro4 Z97 (http://www.asrock.com/mb/intel/z97%20pro4/) and bought a 1TB m.2 Evo 850 SATA recently for more storage (not a boot drive and it was an open box buy so cheaper than a regular SSD, otherwise I would have opted for a 2.5"). The SSD will likely see a ton of read and not much write (audio samples). As one can see on the product page, the GPU basically sits right over top of the m.2 drive. Also, the manual states "one can only choose the m.2 socket 3 or the sata express connector". Also, in the BIOS there's an option to switch from what looks like SATA 4 and 5 to m.2. -I have a GTX960 in the PCIe slot (not OCing or anything) and it looks like it does in fact sit over top of the m.2 slot. Will it overheat the drive? -Is there an issue with connecting an m.2 drive and the GPU? What about with using the regular SATA3 connections for other SSD's and HDD's at the same time as the m.2? Thanks in advance!

First, the M.2 slot on the Z97 Pro4 is connected to the Z97 chipset's PCIe 2.0 lanes. Video cards use the PCIe 3.0 lanes from the CPU, so there is no sharing of resources, between the two.

But, the PCIe 2.0 lanes in the chipset are used by the SATA III ports, so when using the M.2 slot two of the SATA ports will be disabled. From the specs:

The M.2 Socket, SATA3_4, SATA3_5 and SATA Express share lanes. If either one of them is in use, the others will be disabled.

So the SATA3_4 and SATA3_5 ports will be disabled when using the M.2 slot.

Whether or not the M.2 850 EVO will overheat or not depends on too many factors to predict, and will vary depending upon the load on the video card. The amount of PC case ventilation you have, and the way the video card exhausts its heat are examples of those factors.

The M.2 850 EVO probably has a temperature sensor, so you can check the temperature with the Samsung Magician software, or another program like HWiNFO.

Other Samsung M.2 SSDs like the 950 Pro begin to throttle their speed at 70C. Reading from any SSD is less stressful then writing to it. I've never heard of over heating problems with SATA M.2 SSDs. That normally occurs with NVMe M.2 SSDs, since they have the NVMe controller built into the SSD. M.2 SATA SSDs use the SATA controller in the board's chipset.