Small VRAM heatsink on a SSD NVMe? Cheap and efficient…

After the review of SSD coolers, we found some long-forgotten GPU memory heatsinks. Of course, we tested them right away and the results were excellent. It makes us wonder if (and when) is it worth to pay for commercial solutions, because a set of these small “hedgehogs“ costs up to five euros and one packing is usually enough for more uses.

Test procedures

We started with 900 seconds in idle, then continued with 900 seconds of linear reading of 8MB blocks in Aida64 (with an average speed of 2GB/s). The SSD we used is OCZ RD400 with the OS installed.

We  used mainly thermocouples and thermal imager. The tested SSD does have an internal temperature sensor, but it reports a significantly lower temperature than the temperature of the controller, which is the most important. Therefore, we used thermocouple to detect the heating of the surface of the controller casing first, but, for safety reasons, the sensor was placed outside the area where the heating was highest (+ ~ 7 °C). It is attached by a glue which does not transfer heat very well.

The second part of tests focused on heating of the backplate (behind the controller) and the memory closer to the controller, which heats a bit more. We subtracted the temperatures by a properly calibrated UNI-T UT325 thermometer. We took thermal pictures of the heatsink. From the interactive photos, we chose the highest and the average temperature and put it into the charts. We let the SSD cool down before every following test.

The tests were carried out in our wind tunnel with four NF-A12S PWM fans (2 – intake, 2 –outtake) regulated to approximately 550 rpm. The SSD is mounted in the PCIe adapter and in vertical position, which is the most common in practice.