Question Thermal Guard on Gigabyte motherboards

[XSR]

Hello,

Should I get a motherboard that has a thermal guard like B450 AORUS ELITE? Is it necessary?
Or Is the B450 GAMING X good enough?

CPU is 3700x, GPU is 2080.

Thanks.

 

[Darkbreeze]

Are you talking about the M.2 thermal guard? If so, I would absolutely not pick a board contingent upon whether it comes with an M.2 cooler or not as those are mostly snake oil.

 

[CountMike]

Although not "Make or brake" feature for choosing MB, such coolers can help a lot, certainly better than nothing. There are cheap and good aftermarket M.2 coolers and some NVMe SSDs also come with one.

 

[Darkbreeze]

I do NOT believe that they are ALL better than nothing. It depends, and until I see a review of a particular cooler that is reputable, demonstrating a definite appreciable effect, I'm leaning away from these included coolers. I don't know if you've seen this or not, probably you have, but so far I haven't really seen any concrete evidence that these M.2 heatsinks help, and I have seen evidence that in some cases they make things worse.

https://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/2781-msi-m2-heat-shield-increases-temperatures


And after looking, I'm not seeing any reviews of the Gigabyte thermal guard that indicates there is an advantage to using them or having them, over a bare drive. It's possible, because some of these heatsinks have been shown to be helpful, but honestly any M.2 drive stuck right below the GPU fans is probably going to get plenty of airflow over the top of the NAND and the controller, especially if you have a decent lower front intake fan installed and overall have a sufficient case fan configuration to provide a decent exchange rate through the case.

I guess worst case scenario you can try it both ways, and remove it if you don't like it, but I would absolutely not pay extra just to get a board that comes with it.