Samsung 980 Pro PCIe 4.0 NVMe Solid State Drive Review

Overheating & Thermal Throttling

The 980 Pro is the first Gen4 drive that we’ve reviewed that did not come with a heatsink. While our X570 motherboard we tested on has heatsinks we decided to test the 980 Pro as it comes, without a heatsink. Doing this we did notice in some of our tests that something odd was happening. Take for example ATTO Disk Benchmark. Here is our result without a heatsink.

samsung 980pro atto

As you can see the drive performs good throughout most of the test, but then towards the end performance drops considerably. Testing the drive multiple times we got the same result. So I went ahead and used the heatsink from our motherboard and this was the result.

samsung 980pro atto heatsink

As you can see solid performance across the board. So it was very apparent that the drive was overheating and thermally throttling. To see what the temperatures were we used Samsung’s Magician software, which gave us a idle temperature of 49C. When we ran ATTO the drive temperature rose to 82C before it started to throttle.

samsung 980pro temp idle

samsung 980pro temp load

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