The Lexar Professional 2TB NM800 Pro is now shipping on Amazon for $180 or $220 USD. The manufacturer has sent us a sample with the heat sink for our benchmarks and impressions. For this test, we're particularly interested in temperatures and how capable the drive is at maintaining its maximum advertised read rate of 7500 MB/s.
Our host PC for testing the NM800 Pro is the Intel NUC11 with the 11th gen Core i7-1165G7 CPU. It supports PCIe4 x4 transfer rates and it even includes a built-in heat sink for any installed SSD, but we've removed this heat sink inside of the Intel mini PC in order to test the Lexar SSD and heat sink.
Keep in mind that the retail box does not include a screw for securing the drive onto the M.2 slot. Other SSD makers tend to include one in comparison. Hopefully your host device will have a screw already included.
Once installed, we ran DiskSpd in a loop for half an hour to see how warm the drive would become and if transfer rates would need to throttle. Fortunately, our graphs and screenshots below show the drive stabilizing at 7100 MB/s and at a reasonable 66 C. We're unable to reach the advertised 7500 MB/s read rate, however, which is a bit of a bummer. Nonetheless, it's relieving to see no major temperature or throttling problems with the NM800 and heat sink.
To show how important the SSD heat sink can be, we repeated the above test with a 2 TB SK Hynix P41 PCIe4 x4 NVMe SSD with no heat sink installed. Temperatures would reach as high as 93 C necessitating performance throttling to as low as 3500 MB/s. In short, the PCIe4 drive would behave more like a PCIe3 drive if there is no heat sink.
Of course, users can still purchase the Lexar NM800 without the heat sink to save on some cash, but the temperature and performance differences are significant enough for us to recommend a heat sink whenever possible.
Disk Throttling: DiskSpd Read Loop, Queue Depth 8
* ... smaller is better