This got a good review and it’s fairly inexpensive
The fun thing is that I haven’t moved the drives over from my old rig yet, so right now I have a terabyte of storage and no “drives” hooked into the motherboard at all, just this tiny little M.2 board.
Gonna move over my old SSDs to hold games (X-Plane 11 with photoscenery is huuuuuge) and a 4TB data drive, and keep the other M.2 slot open for now to see what happens with Optane.
I haven’t heard anyone talking about M.2 drives failing, even in very hot scenarios where they sit next to water-cooled CPUs, so there’s no directed airflow. I tend to think it’s a myth.
No funds this year but this is what I would build:
ASUS Z170I PRO GAMING mini-ITX $230 CAD
Fractal Design Nano S mini-ITX cse $100 CAD
Noctua NH-D14 CPU cooler $110 CAD
Crucial MX300 1TB M.2 SSD $325 CAD
Vengeance LPX 16GB DDR4 2133MHz CL13 Dual Channel Kit (2x 8GB) $150 CAD
Intel Kaby Lake i5-7500 $275 CAD
Seagate FireCuda 2TB $135 CAD
$1325 before GPU or $50 build fee.
Transplant my existing Gigabyte 6GB GTX 980 ti.
I could save $115 if I get an ASUS H110I-PLUS mobo instead. Hmm.
You don’t want the H110 chipset. Single-channel memory and a bunch of other limitations. http://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-100-series-chipsets,29993.html
Also, you’d want a 270 chipset at this point, not 170, given there’s little price difference. The only good reason to choose a 100-series chipset for Kaby Lake is “I already own one.”
I don’t think there’s a 270 in Mini ITX yet.
Not so different from what I just what just built in that case. I went 6700K and a 960 EVO, skipped the spinny disc and carried over a 1070. You left out a PSU…
Mini-ITX Z270:
https://www.asus.com/Motherboards/ROG-Strix-Z270I-Gaming/
Smaller version of the board I got.
ah not out in canada yet, probably will be $400+
Oh shit I forgot the PSU, you’re right.
+$90 CAD for CorsairCX650M Semi-Modular Power Supply, 650W
Looks like the Gigabyte mini-ITX GA-Z270N-WIFI isn’t bad for $200 CAD:
I ordered this and it finally arrived:
Only $12 but shipping to the US was $10. Essentially just a small heatsink with thermal adhesive and little rubber bands to secure it. Works great, I just installed it on my 960 Pro drive.
My case fan blows directly over my M.2 and the airflow in my PC is the best of any PC I’ve ever built since I used the Corsair 540. The side with the components is super-neat. I was going to tidy up the side with the cables and power supply but realized there was no reason to – just sealed it up and left it looking like my teenager’s room. :) Cable ties would just make later adjustments and upgrades a pain.
Not nearly as sexy as:
Probably overkill though and i don’t plan to use a custom loop anyway.
As far as I can tell it’s overkill to go to any trouble to cool them at all.
Nah it does help a bit
A lot of our test results really surprised us. We knew that M.2 drives would throttle if they got too hot, but we didn’t know that we could cause it to happen so quickly or quite to the extent we measure
Slapping a cheap (thin) thermal adhesive heatsink on them is easy, inexpensive, and almost completely removes all throttling from the picture except for pathological torture test cases.
Still shopping for a mobo, opinions on this one?
and this RAM?
oh and this M.2 drive?
Worst case scenario it throttled after >10 continuous seconds of random writes at 400MB/sec. Unless you run a production database under heavy transactional load on your desktop with poor case ventilation and somehow also locate the SSD under your GPU that’s being blasted at 100% load, that simply isn’t a concern.
Simply copying a large movie to your drive would trigger that. Granted you would have to be copying it from another m.2 PCI drive to achieve that throughput…
Still, arguing against a simple and easy stick on heatsink is not a smart place to end up.