MP600 on Asus ROG Crosshair VIII Hero Installation

I installed a 1TB MP600 NVMe drive on my Asus ROG Crosshair VIII Hero (non-WiFi) motherboard a few days ago. This motherboard has a black rubber block (see image below) between the M.2 connector and the standoff where the drive is secured with a screw. This is designed for bare NVMe drives so that the rubber block pushes the drive up against the motherboard's heat sink for better contact.

 

The problem is that my MP600 drive has a heat sink already and the back plate makes the bottom about 1-2mm thicker than a bare drive. When I screw the drive in all the way it feels like the extra thickness is creating a lot of extra pressure from that black rubber block.

 

I tried pulling on the rubber block, but it's glued on there pretty good and seems non-removable. I know the heat sink on the MP600 is removable, but I don't want to go that route.

 

The extra pressure is created at the two ends of the PCB (one of them being the M.2 connector itself), because the black rubber block is actually pushing against the center of the back plate and not the PCB itself. I worry about long term damage to the drive from that pressure, especially when it gets hot under load.

 

Is this extra pressure normal? I chatted with ASUS support and asked about it. They said it was normal, but they didn't sound very convincing. Their replies sounded pretty generic.

 

I haven't actually used the drive yet (waiting for RAM sticks to arrive), but it's been sitting there screwed in for a few days now and I'm worried about damaging either the drive or the M.2 connector on the board. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

 

Thanks for reading!

 

(Image not my exact board, but same layout for M.2 drives.)

I was in the exact same situation as you, an MP600 and a rubber block causing too much pressure for my taste. My motherboard have a pretty heavy heatsink covering the M.2 connection area, so I ended up carefully removing the original MP600 heatsink and am using the motherboard heatsink.

I was in the exact same situation as you, an MP600 and a rubber block causing too much pressure for my taste. My motherboard have a pretty heavy heatsink covering the M.2 connection area, so I ended up carefully removing the original MP600 heatsink and am using the motherboard heatsink.

 

I did the same

Ok, thanks for the replies! I'm wondering if the motherboard's heat sink would be as good at cooling the drive as the one that comes with it. This is the reason I didn't want to remove the heat sink in the first place.

Ok, thanks for the replies! I'm wondering if the motherboard's heat sink would be as good at cooling the drive as the one that comes with it. This is the reason I didn't want to remove the heat sink in the first place.

 

It depends. In my case as I described my motherboard heatsink is pretty big so it provides sufficient cooling but may not be the case with your motherboard. My suggestion is to carefully remove the MP600's original heatsink, install it on your motherboard with your motherboard's heatsink and then carefully watch up with a monitoring application (HWinfo64 for example) its temperature while under operation. In my case the maximum I saw was 58ºC (under load and with a GPU above), what as far as I know is within acceptable limits.

Thanks for the suggestions. I ended up removing the heat sink from the MP600. It came off easier than I expected. Afterwards I weighed the included heat sink and the heat sink from my motherboard. The heat sink on the motherboard weighed 3g more than the included one, so not a huge difference. Oh well, we'll see how it fares.

Hi, Would whoever has "carefully" removed an MP600 heatsink please share how they did it please, technique, tool used and amount of pressure needed would be a good starting point. I can see the heatsink will come off but it seems pretty tightly fitted and obviously I don't want to damage anything. I am trying to fit 2 of these drives to an Asus ROG Crosshair VIII Hero board. Many thanks