Having had some issues with my motherboards chipset not cooling properly and hitting 100+C I thought I'd have a go a fixing it, there are complaints all over the internet about the issue and the blame generally aimed squarely at Gigabytes feet, suggesting its the GPU release mechanism. Enthusiasts report Gigabyte X870E Aorus Xtreme chipset temps exceeding 100°C | Tom's Hardware After stripping down my motherboard board and fully inspecting the cooling and all the quick release mechanism etc, I could not see how this could separate the chipset cooler from the chipset. The board With Heatsink removed You can already probably guess what really causes the heatsink to detach from the top chipset. When I first installed the board I had three M2 cards in the lower 3 slots, I did not use the 4th upper PCIe x5 M2 slot as I did not have a gen 5 drive and regardless of how often I pulled the GPUs out etc, there was no problem with chipset temps, everything was fine, after a couple of months I decide to put a nice gen5 drive to replace the old gen 3s I was using. This gen5 drive came with a ~0.8mm copper heatspreader, slim, to fit in any machine, so of course I just slapped it in the hole, closing the motherboard M2 heatsink on to it was quite firm but just assumed it of course needs to be under tension for thermal performance, so carried on What this actually did was create a nice leverage point to the M2 quick release mount detaching the chipset heatsink from the chipset as it is using spring loaded tension screws like many heatsinks, causing the problem, such a winner Whilst you can say it is not the best design from Gigabyte, it is as always my brute force approach to problems getting me in trouble, always give it more power So there you go, don't be like me, be sensible, still, I got to get my tools out and have some fun I forgot to take a picture of the underside of heatsink so nabbed this from link below, you can see this his top chipset never made contact unlike mine but chances are he had filled top M2 slot first. X870E AORUS XTREME AI TOP Overheating - Users Complain About Chipset Temperatures Near 110°C | HARDWARE | NEWS
Oh like the labels that are metallic? Yeh I had a similar issue once and have always stripped them off since. What a ballache of a problem though. Funny seeing 2 chip sets backs on mobos though. Oh Northridge, how I miss thee
Yup, gigabyte did actually pack a load of M2 pads in the box of differing thicknesses, a smarter person would have used them, live and learn
TBH that is bad design on Gigabyte. The gen 5 M2 heatsink mounting point should be on the PCB in the same way as the latch for the big top cover heatsink. So that the chipset mount tension can never be changed by the end user.
Nope, my Gen5 is much cooler than my Samsung 990 pro Gen 4 by about 50%. Infact that will be my next tear down to make sure the Samsung doesn't have the opposite problem and is not touching the M2 heatsink, aaaargh M2 pads..... Agreed, not the best design on an otherwise great motherboard, although for my purpose I could have saved a ton and got most of what I wanted like dual 10G etc, from the B850 AI TOP.
Got my chunky boy GPU out again (yay for the foresight to fit Quick Disconnects in the WC setup ) and indeed I did have the opposite problem where the M2 drive did not touch the heatsink completely in all areas, some chips with different z heights, so this time used one of Gigabytes provided squishys pads, job done, 990pro now a lot cooler but still not as cool as the Gen 5 drive but it is fair to say the Gen 5 is fitted with a monster heatsink whereas the Samsung is sat under a 3x M2 heatspreader plate under a GPU (first image in my original post ) still mid 40s is better than mid 90s
