4 weeks ago - last edited 4 weeks ago
Hi beautiful people,
I have had... a journey with this motherboard.
The tl;dr would be:
Chipset and Gen5 SSD overheat to the point of bluescreen and system shutdown. If one is using only the Gen5 SSD on the bottom slot with an aftermarket cooling solution, is the other chipset (the one on the separate card attached to the chunk of aluminium labelled 'M.2 Gen 5 & Chipset Heatsink') needed at all or can I leave it unplugged?
Reason for the question in the long post below.
I set it up this motherboard along with a 7950X3D and a RTX 4090 (modified with Phanteks T30 fans) in a Cooler Master MasterBox NR200P MAX case.
Originally it had 2 SSDs, a Crucial T700 and a WD Black SN850X.
Given that the game I had been playing the most turned out to be not very demanding the fact that the chipset and the T700 were idling at 75C and 71C respectively wasn't much of an issue, the game itself was installed on the SN850X so that probably contributed to the general perception of stability.
Alas, when I recently decided to give the new Indiana Jones game a try things went... awry. After an hour or so of playing both the T700 and the chipset would severely overheat, I'd get a blue screen and the PC would shut down.
Furthermore the T700 would not 'come back to life' until everything had cooled down.
After three instances of this behaviour it became clear that unless I did something radical it wasn't going to work out, so I decided to move everything to an open rack (think 2020 aluminium extrusion 'lego') as given where the PC 'lives' noise and appearance aren't really a consideration, do this to the 'main' chipset:
https://hackmd.io/@reneil1337/chipset-fix
Put one of these on the T700:
https://www.thermalright.com/product/hr-10-2280-pro-black/
Let go of having 2 SSDs and just live with one (once you put an aftermarket cooler on the bottom SSD the 'framework' for the top one has nowhere to go). Not the end of the world, can live with this.
And this LC for the CPU with the pump 'inverted' (not the manufacturer's recommended configuration but should be OK with a couple of caveats according to their support) so the included 60mm blows towards the chipset and I can use the aftermarket cooler on the SSD (it interferes with the tubing otherwise):
https://www.arctic.de/en/Liquid-Freezer-III-280/ACFRE00135A
After doing all this the SSD now idles at 36C, the chipset at 45C and after playing the game for a couple of hours (with 22C ambient) I get 50C and 61C respectively. So far so good.
However, this leaves me with a conundrum. The 'M.2 Gen 5 & Chipset Heatsink' which doubled up as the slot for the 2nd SSD has nowhere to go and it has a chipset attached to it, which shows as 'Chipset 2' in BIOS but for the life of me I cannot find any temp monitoring software (including ASUS' own Armory Crate) that 'sees' it.
I did put together a heatsink for it using a low profile (6mm) copper SSD heatsink (which was already of appropriate width-ish, 22mm instead of 24 but w/e at this point, cutting it to 29mm length and tapping a couple of m2.5 threads in the appropriate locations as to use the original M2.5x3 to M2 standoffs) and some good quality thermal tape but because I can only monitor the temp in BIOS I have no idea what is doing temp wise while I am using the PC, so if is only needed for the 2nd SSD I would be much happier not plugging it in at all. One fewer concern, I had enough of them with this MB already.
While in BIOS, after an hour with 22C ambient it never exceeds 50C but given past 'troubles' and the fact that this is a 'hacked together' solution I am really not filled with confidence at this point.
Apologies for the long post, I just thought context to the question could be important.