Sunday, June 27th 2021
Gigabyte Preparing X570SI Aorus Pro AX Passively Cooled Mini-ITX Motherboard
Gigabyte has already announced several new X570S motherboards which all feature passive cooling thanks to the upgraded chipset. These motherboards were all on the larger size so it is good to see that Gigabyte is also planning to update their Mini-ITX X570I Aorus Pro Wifi with the new chipset. The X570SI Aorus Pro AX removes the chipset cooling fan found on the old model and increases VRM cooling with a new heatsink. The motherboard will retain all the features of the original including Wifi 6 with the product name change simply for cohesiveness.
Source:
VideoCardz
8 Comments on Gigabyte Preparing X570SI Aorus Pro AX Passively Cooled Mini-ITX Motherboard
X570I Aorus: 6+2 TDA21472
B550I Aorus AX: 6+2 ISL99390
X570SI Aorus: 8+2 ????
But I have to wonder who exactly would want to buy this. The B550 board is one of the best price-performance AM4 ITX boards, and this board does basically nothing extra except for the VRM, which was already good enough for anything. The original X570I was a $50+ CAD markup over the B550I, this X570SI probably even more expensive judging from the design differences.
And the z-height of the M.2 heatsink, yikes. Gigabyte's idiotic solid chunk of metal (not the actual M.2 heatsink that suffocating underneath) on the Z490I Ultra and B550I Aorus AX is literally the first thing to come off the board, as soon as owners realize it hampers thermals / needs to come off to fit their downdraft coolers (e.g. Blackridge). Looks like this one can't/shouldn't even be removed, to give the X570 PCH the heatsink it needs, so why get this over the B550 where you can simply remove the clearance issue with two screws and still not lose any M.2 thermal performance?
When I still had my B450 board I actually contacted Noctua because one of my A12x25s kept stopping and I thought it was faulty, but I realized that it was the Y-splitter - one of the ends is 3-pin but the other is only 2-pin. All you have to do is go back to fan control and set your fans to Voltage control instead of PWM, every fan header has that option.
I have never gotten any pair out of my NF-F12s, NF-A12x25s and NF-A8s to work properly with the splitter on PWM, on my Gigabyte B450 and B550 boards. Lots of different combinations, not one worked consistently (sometimes you have to run it for two or three days and all of a sudden find that your GPU is running hot because one fan isn't spinning at all/intermittently). Fix has always been to run it on voltage, works like a charm every time.
I wouldn't call voltage a "retarded fix" though......yes it is "primitive" by comparison but in 2 years I have literally never noticed a negative impact on granularity of control, performance or noise with voltage control on any fans, on any modern board. Because Gigabyte lacks the step-up and step-down control of Asus, a custom flatter fan curve is pretty much mandatory for Ryzens.
However, interestingly enough, any splitter connected to the CPU header on either B450 or B550 board has never had a problem, although the only fans connected to that header have been my NF-A9x14s and NF-A9s.
Replaced with Toughfan 12s an not looking back. They are even significantly quieter than the Noctuas in direct proximity of the NR200 bottom fan filter.