Power Consumption and Temperatures

Cooling is one area I was both impressed and disappointed with. First, I was impressed with the VRM cooler; it's small and isn't placed where it's going to catch a whole lot of airflow because it is so short, yet thanks to the highly efficient VRM design below that cooler, the metal element barely gets warm at all and easily matches temperatures seen on much more robust VRM designs with much larger coolers. ASRock designed their VRM extremely well, and it shows in all of their recent boards products, and this one especially.

But then there is the chipset cooler. I'm not happy to see temperatures that are approaching 70 °C here because that heat is going to get transferred to other areas of the board, as I easily saw with my IR thermometer. The high temperatures of the chipset cooler caused increased temperatures of my M.2 devices, by as much as 10 °C in some cases. I'll readily admit I put this board through a situation where there was nearly no airflow at all across the board and the ASRock H370M-ITX/ac did hold up fairly well, but things would be better if the chipset cooler had a bit more heft to it. Be that as it may, with this H370M-ITX/ac being priced at $100 or there about, and these temperatures seemingly not really affecting anything with how the chipset operates, it isn't that big of a deal, but those temperatures coming from a device that is rated to pull only 6 W isn't exactly to my personal liking.