Does fanless motherboards have faulty design?

[mclaren85]

Hello everyone!

Since I believe a sturdy and a cool motherboard is the most important part of the system, I've decided to buy the MSI Meg x570s ace max, the second most expensive motherboard for MSI only after their flagship Godlike.
But I carefully monitor the chipset temperature, and while the system is idle, the temp is 56C at minimum, if I move big files from usb to hdd and vice versa, the temp easily escalates to 70C. My old tuf x570 chipset was much lower thanks to its fan.
So do you think this fanless x570 designs are faulty? Isn't the idle temp of 60C too much?

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

Hello everyone!

Since I believe a sturdy and a cool motherboard is the most important part of the system, I've decided to buy the MSI Meg x570s ace max, the second most expensive motherboard for MSI only after their flagship Godlike.
But I carefully monitor the chipset temperature, and while the system is idle, the temp is 56C at minimum, if I move big files from usb to hdd and vice versa, the temp easily escalates to 70C. My old tuf x570 chipset was much lower thanks to its fan.
So do you think this fanless x570 designs are faulty? Isn't the idle temp of 60C too much?
View attachment 236334

Not really, most likely it Was tested plus chips are fine upto 95°C usually so your not beyond that and finally you report no issues besides your perspective on temperature, if it's not broken or giving issues I wouldn't worry.
Mines actively cooled by a small ass fan and does see similar temperature levels anyway.

 

[Jose Jeswin]

Or if it bothers you too much, you can try fixing some stick-on ram heatsinks onto the hot components...i have a cheapo asus prime a320mk whose vrms temps shoot upto 67 C at idle and upto 79-83 C at load...i stuck some ram sinks to the vrms and the temps dropped by 3 to 5 C at load...

just be careful you dont bridge any exposed components and short the motherboard..

And you can try directing a fan towards your vrm heatsink if your motherboard already has a heatsink on the board...

 

[mclaren85]

Or if it bothers you too much, you can try fixing some stick-on ram heatsinks onto the hot components...i have a cheapo asus prime a320mk whose vrms temps shoot upto 67 C at idle and upto 79-83 C at load...i stuck some ram sinks to the vrms and the temps dropped by 3 to 5 C at load...

View attachment 236337

View attachment 236338

just be careful you dont bridge any exposed components and short the motherboard..

And you can try directing a fan towards your vrm heatsink if your motherboard already has a heatsink on the board...

That's a very, very nice work! But my problem is not about VRMs, but the passive cooled chipset

 

[Jose Jeswin]

All the same, you can get stick-on chipset heatsinks too like these...some of them even come with 40mm fans..
You can also install gpu heatsinks onto you motherboard chipset if you have an old or dead graphics card..

you will have search a bit for the proper size and fit.....i am sure you will be able to do it easily..

 

[Bill_Bright]

IMO, I would much rather have a fanless motherboard. I hate fan noise and the smaller the fan, the more racket they tend to make. A quality motherboard will have quality heatsinks.

So then it is up to you, the user, to put that motherboard in a quality case that provides sufficient cooling to extract the heat radiated off those heatsinks. And of course, it is up to you, the user, to properly configure that case cooling to ensure there an adequate "flow" of cool air through the case.

So I say before you even think of changing out heatsinks, you look at your case cooling. The folks at MSI are not stupid. They would not put inadequate heatsinks on their boards.

 

[Watermelon5]

They only started putting fans on most motherboards in the past what like 10 years? Super high end and server boards had em but out of the 13 motherboards I own, only 1 has fans. I often put heatsinks on bare chipsets, since some of the older ones don't even have cooling on the northbridge/southbridge but I've never needed active cooling on a chipset - cases with enough airflow and fans can cool the small heatsinks just fine

 

[Shihab]

The rule of thumb regarding motherboard temperature readings: Ignore them.
There are ways through which you could slash that figure by a few digits, but you'd just be nitpicking. These chips can survive much worse than this.

And passive cooled chipsets is the norm these days. Active cooling is the exception (and I dare say a gimmick. VRM coolers notwithstanding).

 

[Bill_Bright]

They only started putting fans on most motherboards in the past what like 10 years?

Not even "most"! And it was long before that too.

Way WAY back, motherboards used to come with fans typically on the chipset's Northbridge. They typically were thin and tiny 40mm fans that had to spin at 100mph to do any good. This high speed spinning resulted in very annoying high-pitch fan noise. It also resulted in the fan's bearings failing prematurely - often.

So motherboard makers starting using bigger and better passive (no fan) heatsinks. Plus chipsets started getting integrated and more energy efficient (thus producing less heat).

And for sure, the vast majority of motherboards these days do not have fans. Instead, most motherboards rely, as they should (IMO), on quality, efficient heatsinks and quality case cooling.

I will also note there are a couple reasons motherboard designers cluster heat sensitive and heat generating devices around the CPU socket. One is for shorter distances which means faster speeds. But it also means those devices can take advantage of the air turbulence caused by the CPUs cooling fan.

Edit comment: fixed a couple typos.

 

[INSTG8R]

It just runs hot, period. Even with my fan set to the “Max” I can choose (Performance) it still hits 61C sometimes higher. Literally the hottest thing in my case after my GPU…

 

[Bill_Bright]

I don't know about "sometimes higher" but 61°C is not "hot".

 

[INSTG8R]

I don't know about "sometimes higher" but 61°C is not "hot".

My only point was it’s the hottest component on the board…

 

[looniam]

They only started putting fans on most motherboards in the past what like 10 years? Super high end and server boards had em but out of the 13 motherboards I own, only 1 has fans. I often put heatsinks on bare chipsets, since some of the older ones don't even have cooling on the northbridge/southbridge but I've never needed active cooling on a chipset - cases with enough airflow and fans can cool the small heatsinks just fine

bill beat me to it. i've burn my fingers on north bridges all the time hello. nvidia!! yes nvida use to make chipsets!. its been since x570, which tripled the TDP from x470 (~5w vs ~15w) that they started to appear again. the X570S has ~10watts which is suppose to help keep the cooling passive as before.

So do you think this fanless x570 designs are faulty? Isn't the idle temp of 60C too much?

no, not really. i myself has been surprised how much energy (power/heat) it takes to push data around a bus. but to be sure i tried googling AMD's specs and couldn't find anything.

 

[Assimilator]

My only point was it’s the hottest component on the board…

VRMs say hello.

 

[INSTG8R]

VRMs say hello.

LOL never seen it tick past 50, but please do on...

 

[eidairaman1]

They only started putting fans on most motherboards in the past what like 10 years? Super high end and server boards had em but out of the 13 motherboards I own, only 1 has fans. I often put heatsinks on bare chipsets, since some of the older ones don't even have cooling on the northbridge/southbridge but I've never needed active cooling on a chipset - cases with enough airflow and fans can cool the small heatsinks just fine

Erm some Skt A and 478 boards had them

 

[Keullo-e]

Back in the day having a small and annoying chipset fan was in the majority of boards. Many probably remembers the chipset cooler from DFI Lanparty NF4 boards for example?

Core 2 era boards had much more innovation what comes to motherboard cooling than modern boards:

 

[Tetras]

Hello everyone!

Since I believe a sturdy and a cool motherboard is the most important part of the system, I've decided to buy the MSI Meg x570s ace max, the second most expensive motherboard for MSI only after their flagship Godlike.
But I carefully monitor the chipset temperature, and while the system is idle, the temp is 56C at minimum, if I move big files from usb to hdd and vice versa, the temp easily escalates to 70C. My old tuf x570 chipset was much lower thanks to its fan.
So do you think this fanless x570 designs are faulty? Isn't the idle temp of 60C too much?

From what I've read, even X570 boards with a fan don't seem to kick-in properly until around 60C, so if it has a max of around 70 I'd say you're fine. What are the gaming temps like?

I could be wrong, but I've never seen detailed chipset specs published publicly from AMD, like Intel do, but I assume MSI would have them when they designed the board.

 

[eidairaman1]

Back in the day having a small and annoying chipset fan was in the majority of boards. Many probably remembers the chipset cooler from DFI Lanparty NF4 boards for example?

Core 2 era boards had much more innovation what comes to motherboard cooling than modern boards:
View attachment 236354

Yup when MSI was a badass contender, same with Gigabyte...

 

[Bill_Bright]

Back in the day having a small and annoying chipset fan was in the majority of boards.

I don't know about the majority - but certainly many.

It should also be noted that "back in the day", "large" case fans were 120mm - most were just 80mm, some only 60mm. And many cases had just one case fan in back for cooling - along with whatever extra air flow the PSU fan could provide. In fact, some cases didn't even have one case fan. They depended entirely on the PSU fan.

 

[Keullo-e]

I don't know about the majority - but certainly many.

It should also be noted that "back in the day", "large" case fans were 120mm - most were just 80mm, some only 60mm. And many cases had just one case fan in back for cooling - along with whatever extra air flow the PSU fan could provide. In fact, some cases didn't even have one case fan. They depended entirely on the PSU fan.

Yeah, 80mm fans were common and there was usually just one intake and one exhaust. And yeah, 120mm fans started getting more common in the mid-2000s.

 

[Watermelon5]

Erm some Skt A and 478 boards had them

That's why I said "most"

 

[Bill_Bright]

You did say "most" but that still is not true. Most motherboards made in the last 10 years do NOT have fans, only large (compared to older boards) heatsinks.

You also said "only" which is not true either since fans were common many, many years prior to that.

 

[Keullo-e]

For consumer boards excluding AM4, I remember only some X79/X99 boards having chipset fans for the last 10 years and they're HEDT, not your average gaming platforms.

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

You did say "most" but that still is not true. Most motherboards made in the last 10 years do NOT have fans, only large (compared to older boards) heatsinks.

You also said "only" which is not true either since fans were common many, many years prior to that.

While I do agree with you on the whole regarding motherboard small fans, they were at one point a necessity as you know but modern ones from my present example have improved, I do run a load and temp with moderate fan curve's but under load or idle they're not noticeable.

I have a boards with no such fan's too and it's fine too.