Question Which M2 slot for NVME boot drive?

[steve489]

What's the best M2 slot to use on an ASUS Z790 board for a single NVME boot drive? Slot 1 next to the GPU interfaced to the CPU but a poor spot for cooling or one of the other slots having better airflow? I will be using a Nvidia RTX 2060 Super GPU.

 

[bniknafs9]

wouldn't really matter , the heat from your GPU won't get to your m2 drive really .

 

[Lafong]

What's the best M2 slot to use on an ASUS Z790 board for a single NVME boot drive? Slot 1 next to the GPU interfaced to the CPU but a poor spot for cooling or one of the other slots having better airflow? I will be using a Nvidia RTX 2060 Super GPU.

Which of your M2 ports have built-in heatsinks?

For most use cases, the NVMe temps will be well short of throttling, but maybe you are the type who is highly concerned about temps for PC components?

 

[CelicaGT]

Use the one next to the GPU slot, as you noted it's directly coupled to the CPU. Heat issues are overblown, typically only an issue when drives are being flogged with read/write during benchmarks or when used for some very niche software. Most of the time the drive controller (the actual part that gets hot) will be sitting twiddling its thumbs. Also consider that having that lower M.2 slot open and accessible for secondary drives and upgrades is a nice thing.