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VIII Formula m.2 clearance to cover? Also bios settings for M.2 drive???

scgt1
Level 8
Sitting at idle I'm at 64C on my 950 pro 512. This is nuts to say the least. When I swapped over to this setup from a VI Formula I don't really recall noticing much if any clearance that would be available between the chips and the cheesy plastic cover that Asus designed to cover the m.2 slot. (Seriously though what were the engineers thinking in not making this cover aluminum and to where it will contact the chips on an m.2 drive)

I've had a heck of a time getting the M.2 drive to actually boot into windows. Coming from a Corsair Neutron GTX MBR Win 7 Os install to migrating it over to the ssd was a task in it's own converting mbr to GPT etc. I finally got it booting into windows now but the boot time seems a ton slower then the Neutron. From what I can tell CSM slows down boot time but I have to have it on because my ref XFX 290X isn't compatible with UEFI bios. So looking for what others may have settings on for partial UEFI hardware and what your startup and Crystal Mark results are.

Mine are way off from what others are getting. :mad:
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Minsekt
Level 7
well its not the boards nor the ssds fault that you have to enable csm. temps are normal for the 950 pro, and theyre almost the same on my m8f than on my r5e, which doesnt have a cover. so i wouldnt worry about the temps. do you have the samsung driver installed or are you using the windows one?
readings are sometimes a little off, depending on how much storage is used on the drive. my readings look the same like yours, every other benchmark run the write speed spikes up to 1400mb/s. its kinda normal and behaves on my r5e exactly like on the m8f. my boottime is about 4-5seconds excluding POST. as for bios settings, there are none - except the drive is running at gen2 if youre using a different bclk than 100. (at least thats the case on the x99 chipset, im not sure if this is true for z170 too.)

Minsekt wrote:
well its not the boards nor the ssds fault that you have to enable csm. temps are normal for the 950 pro, and theyre almost the same on my m8f than on my r5e, which doesnt have a cover. so i wouldnt worry about the temps. do you have the samsung driver installed or are you using the windows one?
readings are sometimes a little off, depending on how much storage is used on the drive. my readings look the same like yours, every other benchmark run the write speed spikes up to 1400mb/s. its kinda normal and behaves on my r5e exactly like on the m8f. my boottime is about 4-5seconds excluding POST. as for bios settings, there are none - except the drive is running at gen2 if youre using a different bclk than 100. (at least thats the case on the x99 chipset, im not sure if this is true for z170 too.)


Hmm never got the email notification of your post. Mine is set for auto in bios. With doing more checking what is going on is thermal throttling. Right around the 67C mark these drives apparently start to throttle bad which is the stoop in performance.

My boot times are not correct though. Most people are loaded from power switch to windows desktop around 30s. I was using the stop watch on my android last night and came up with these:

Complete restart time (Clicking restart in win7 to it rebooting and reloading into windows) 56.23
Complete cold boot time (Power button to being in windows) (24s until the loading windows screen)46.08

Although I think I hit stop too soon because windows reports a different load time. Apparently there were other background things still loading of windows.
Windows has started up:
Boot Duration : 102054ms

Ugh the message wrap on this forum lol
Forgot to answer about drivers. I had to install the windows hotfix since I'm on win 7. I've also installed the sammy driver.

UPDATE TO PERFORMANCE/Settings

My settings are fine the speed issue is in relation to thermal throttling. This is a piss poor design on Asus's part with stuffing a hot device like this where it can't be effectively cooled. I installed a Antec Tricool 120mm fan and set it on high directly against the board where the m.2 drive is hidden behind the "PLASTIC" armor (Why didn't they make it aluminum and to have some heatsink ability)
My benchmarks show some pretty good improvement but I'm still dealing with thermal throttling as seen in the second picture. I was thinking of getting an Antec Spot Cool 80 but I don't see that being any better then what I was testing with. Especially since @ high 2000rpm the tricool flows 79CFM where the spot cool @ high 3000rpm flows only 22CFM.

One of many bench results without extra cooling (NO BIOS CHANGES)

Bench results after the extra cooling which still doesn't effectively cool the drive.

The not so great cooling solution I have to work with as a test.


Now that I know what is going on and the fact even if heatsinks would fit under the cover I don't feel they will effectively help with no ability to flow any air around them I'm about to order one of these:
http://www.performance-pcs.com/silverstone-dual-m-2-to-pci-e-x4-and-sata-6g-adapter-card.html
then some of these:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835708154&cm_re=ENZOTECH_BMR-C1-LE-_-35-708-15...