Gadgetory

we're looking at this this little piece of metal this heat shield as amasai calls it that's the subject of our ire for today MSI brandishes this little shroud as a heat shield while simultaneously claiming that it's sort of a heat sink ignoring the fact that the concepts are different opposites really we decided to break this out of the fall gaming Pro carbon Z 270 review and analyze this one little piece of MSI's engineering and marketing before getting to that this coverage is brought to you by catalyst energy Mintz Doug the energy drink killer catalyst mints have been endorsed by celebrities such as t-pain did not know that and continued to grow within the gaming industry use code gamers nexus for 5% off at the link in the description below the thing we were most immediately interested in with the MSI gaming Pro carbon Z 270 motherboard this one was its SSD shield and that's what this is right here msi says that this reduces the EMI or interference basically not really much of an issue with SSDs nonetheless if this pose reduced EMI but more in our ballpark of testing it's supposed to help with thermals and they do that apparently by using the world's thinnest thermal pad on the inside of the heat shield and again two different things here heat sinks and shield we tested this shield or sink or whatever it is with MDOT - SSDs that we know to get pretty hot like this HyperX predator SSD that is loaded with thermal couples right now that's the wiring coming off of it so that was used test MC basically does this thing help or hurt temperatures because if you think about it it's sitting there on the board sort of in this area over an MDOT two device and that's supposed to somehow help with the heat so that was the specific question is does it actually hurt temperature more than it helps the full motherboard review including vrm discussion and analysis will be a separate content piece so you'll get the most steps possible but this is really just a focus on the one item the full testing methodology as always is available in the article link the description below that also contains some additional information on the motherboard layout thermal testing things like that all defines in the article is where as a watch and read for the thermal analysis if you're not sure how we do our testing MSI's website claims that this is a quote heat shield and that it also quotes lowers temperature and prevents thermal throttling so it's there's a few problems here the language is one thing we'll get to that in a moment but the shield enshrouds just the top side of the SSD so it's not a full coverage of an MDOT to drive and a lot of these have SMD components on either side of the stick so that's important first of all also the shield on their site is advertised as being able to protect the SSD from physical harm not sure what kind of physical harm would befall your MDOT to SSD as it's tucked away in the middle of the board under a video card and whatever else might be there but I suppose it would be shielded from said to harm so first of all again let's get some language straight and then we'll go into testing and see what the differences are with and without the same language they call it a heat shield but they act like it's a heat sink the difference is with a heat shield that you're trying to keep the heat away from something to this the idea of this as a shield would be that perhaps you put it here to cover the drive and then if you have a GPU that's handing over it's like if you're running multi GPU and the second video card is sitting over top of the m2 slot which of course would be dumping heat into that drive directly that's not ideal then it would be a heat shield it would be hopefully protecting or keeping some of that heat away from touching things like the flash modules directly as a heat sink what it's trying to do and what it does by way of its thermal pad however useless this one maybe is trying to conduct heat or energy in the form of heat away from the SSD so for this one and most SSDs actually you're going to end up with the label on the top side that's connected to that thermal pad not the most effective set up in the world you probably want to peel that label off for the efficacy although some do have built-in thermal pads and things like that so you end up hurting your performance also with the heatsink as you'll see with any heatsink that we filmed in the past you'd want to think to conduct energy in the form of heat again from the SMD s but theoretically you'd want to further dissipate it by either some sort of cooling apparatus or just a thin array and then hope that the ambient is strong enough to dissipate through the thin this has neither we can perhaps talk up the shield and heatsink differences to a potential language barrier between the Taiwan based engineering team and us-based marketing team but that's giving an awful lot of slack as for thermal properties it's an interesting test subject by looking at the thing that's got the top side of the SSD covered but nothing on the bottom side so we're soaking heat from one side of em to stick and leaving the other bare and in a hot air pocket of the shield's own making on the motherboard side of the stick further the shield is just a passive block with a thermal pad there's no way to dissipate the heat once it's accumulated and because MSI's doesn't use actual fins here it's got really no chance at all of ever shedding or even distributing that heat without a side panel case fan so the process for the set up was to first use a thermal camera to identify hot spots on the m2 SSD accounting for emissivity pretty easily since we're only measuring an all-black surface and not dealing with any reflective material huge note here like we talked about in our previous thermal camera PSA the point of the camera is not to conduct the actual test because one you really get nothing of value when you point it at this thing and that's not because it's bad it's because it's shiny and it's not the surface of the drive versus pointing it here that doesn't tell us anything other than the temperature of that surface and whatever reflective properties that may have so that's not why we use the camera use the camera to rapidly prototype and figure out on the bare drive where do these thermocouples belong and in this case there's one on the bottom side on the flash module closest to the pin top side closer to the pins because in testing those areas were shown to have upwards of 90 Celsius in their worst case scenarios the SSD was burned in width are doing the sequential 128kb rites for 60 minutes here's a chart of the results this is in Delta T well gets the sort of total results in a moment and that's important because we're subtracting ambient seconds second for the most accurate results will show the other numbers next without MSI's shields it just using the bear drive but we're seeing numbers that plot the HyperX predator and to SSD at 22.1 5c for the top flash module and that's idol and 61.3 to see for the load temperature compared to the version with the heatsink the top flash module is now operating at an idle temperature of 22 to C so about two South via and a load temperature of about 60.3 Celsius or about 1c lower that's an improvement of 1c for the top of the end up to SSD and because of how we're testing that's not within margin of error that is repeatable and approvable and we have calibrated the thermocouples that said let's look at the real secret here the underside module temperature shows that adding the shield means we have no escape for the warm air generated between the m2 device and the motherboard further there's no shielding contact in the SSD components on the underside this means that we're seeing a somewhat impressively bad for Celsius temperature hike on the bottom side cooling for both idle and load when we add MSI's heat shield or heat sink or whatever it is let's move over to the other chart that's accounting for ambience differently just to really drive home how critical is for Celsius it's Wayne is we see that we're hitting at ninety 3.6 Celsius versus eighty 9.6 Alice's when under load that's enough to start entering throttle territory for some SSDs meaning that you potentially lose some performance to keep the thin under temperature control the controller temperature and its internal sensor placed by Kingston is measuring about four Celsius higher idle and four to five celcius hot here under load for the heat shield versus no heat shield or just a bear drive so we learn that the only thing that this is shielding the SSD from is proper cooling MSI should either ditch it all together or they should make it wrap around the entire MDOT to stick so that it's actually making full contact with every SMD and hopefully there's some better dissipation method but that seems like it's asking a whole lot for something that's really ultimately meant to be a marketing gimmick and that's not necessarily to degrade what it's trying to do because motherboards by and large are marketing gimmicks these days so much is on the cpu now there's not a whole lot less than manufacturers it's got good intentions it's just really poorly executed it was poorly designed I don't know that it was even tested because we're seeing worse results with it than the one Celsius reduction on the top side I guess and the improvement there is definitely not worth it is patently false that this is a heat sink in a way that would actually benefit the user in fact the claim is that this would reduce the chance of thermal throttling and from this it could increase if we didn't necessarily see any thermal throttling with this particular drive if you use something like faster stick than what we've got here that's older now HyperX predator this is a bit aged these days we use something a bit faster than this that's going to be under more duress when doing intensive workloads it could start entering that territory of throttling a bit earlier than what we see here so overall this motherboard will be doing the full review separately as I said the board itself is not bad it's actually a bit better than the out of box gigabyte gaming 7 that we reviewed though that should now have the BIOS update which would theoretically reverse that statement but I'll be testing that soon the board itself is pretty good at overclocked well we were hitting 5.1 gigahertz on it and on weaker boards we weren't able to do that with the 7700 K the board layout it's good the feature set overall pretty comprehensive it's affordable in the price points $165 or something but that doesn't excuse this being if this shield were just useless that's one thing but I don't want you to buy the board and stick your m2 SSD under this and lose performance without knowing it or just increase the heat for no reason without losing performance because that's why would you do that that's dumb especially when you're inside of a case we tested all open air inside of KCI Kaizen a means of 30 to 40 Celsius as we've shown with most vacations we've reviewed and that means your temperature increases substantially so that that's another interesting test case that was not looked at but the performance would only worsen so I take away here is stick around for the full review the board might be worth buying for you for a d2 70 platform but if you do buy it hopefully it's at a slightly reduced price and just no end up to SSDs under this that's that's all this is setting out to say so thank you for watching as always it click the patreon link in the post roll video or go to patreon.com/crashcourse exis for a pathway to help us directly produce this type of content it is fairly research intensive and we use expensive thermocouples not only expensive because they're self-adhesive which is really cool subscribe for more content and the review I'll see you all next time you