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Overheating chipset.

NotHarry
Level 7
I have had a lot of trouble with my new 'Asus rog strix z690-A Gaming wifi D4' motherboard. My latest problem is a chipset that idles at 60c+.
I want to strip the heatsink for chipset in order to reseat it but you have this daft piece of plastic over the heatsink that has a cable tie attached to it, and I don't know how to remove it.
Have any of you guys striped the northbridge heat sink from one of these boards, how do you get the piece of plastic off first?
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97 REPLIES 97

Adrian1983 wrote:
Yep this is kinda the boat I'm in, I've heard they don't even screw the screws on the back of the board down properly on some boards hence the much higher temps on some models and pad is either not installed or not installed correctly, I've just installed a little 60mm fan on top of the chipset, Hasn't really made much difference a few C at best so that tells you it's not mounted properly (Poor quality control)

Same here I'm not about to ruin my CPU application and remove the board because of this, It's the board designers fault so I don't care and I am not wasting any more time on trying to fix a poor QC fault.

What's even more annoying is it's mounted from the back with screws on some so I'm guessing it's the same for the Gaming A also, Yet another oversight from Asus, Why do you need to mount a tiny little heatsink from the back of the board and make it inaccessible without literally destroying your setup, All it needed was 2 tiny screws to hold this flimsy heatsink on and they could have been mounted at the front and not the back.


The heat sink on the Asus board was slack and the screws took no pressure to undo. The dry thermal pad I found underneath had hardly any indentation what so ever. I also would imagine the thick plastic shroud covering 3 quarters of the heat sink was helping to keep the heat in rather than disperse it. The rest of that board ran pretty cool but that didn't matter as the chipset alone was driving those temps up.
Anyone with the same problem I would encourage to remove and reseat it. The job is not a large one. I have not tested mine but a guy on overclockers done the same procedure and reported temp drops down to the 30s on idle. So it is worth it because the temps caused by these chipsets can be quite scary.

NotHarry wrote:
The heat sink on the Asus board was slack and the screws took no pressure to undo. The dry thermal pad I found underneath had hardly any indentation what so ever. I also would imagine the thick plastic shroud covering 3 quarters of the heat sink was helping to keep the heat in rather than disperse it. The rest of that board ran pretty cool but that didn't matter as the chipset alone was driving those temps up.
Anyone with the same problem I would encourage to remove and reseat it. The job is not a large one. I have not tested mine but a guy on overclockers done the same procedure and reported temp drops down to the 30s on idle. So it is worth it because the temps caused by these chipsets can be quite scary.


Doesn't surprise me the screws were loose and that explains the dry pad, I may have a look next week, I'm just waiting for a Cablemod 12VHPWR cable for my 4090 which is due early next week so while I've got the GPU out and PSU cables I might take a look, I've still got some Gelid extreme thermal pads knocking about somewhere in 1.5 and 2mm I think so if I've got access to the back of the board when I take the right panel off I may take a look.

Any idea what thickness the chipset thermal pads is? Or is thermal paste better? I'm guessing if yours is a pad I suspect the Strix is also which would be too big of a gap for paste I reckon.

Adrian1983 wrote:
Doesn't surprise me the screws were loose and that explains the dry pad, I may have a look next week, I'm just waiting for a Cablemod 12VHPWR cable for my 4090 which is due early next week so while I've got the GPU out and PSU cables I might take a look, I've still got some Gelid extreme thermal pads knocking about somewhere in 1.5 and 2mm I think so if I've got access to the back of the board when I take the right panel off I may take a look.

Any idea what thickness the chipset thermal pads is? Or is thermal paste better? I'm guessing if yours is a pad I suspect the Strix is also which would be too big of a gap for paste I reckon.


It might be a good Idea to sort it before you make your final build. A 4090? Very nice.
These are the pads I use and just cut what I need. Seem to do a good job. Hope the link shows up.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B094PWW9TM/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o03_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

The pad I took off was strange. You could sort of pull it apart like a bit of old leather. I can't seeing it making any sort of good contact even if it was firmly seated.

In the end i chose 1mm pad + paste as a replacement for the old 2mm dried up one.
96396
Beefing up the metal mass helps as well.

IT_Troll
Level 10
Yes the rear mounting is a real pain, it is the same on the Z690-G. I really don't want to have to strip out my whole system to fix this. I'll have a play with PCH voltage, I am using all three M.2 slots though so don't want to risk data corruption.

JohnAb
Level 17
I'm using all three M.2 slots as well and I've had no stability issues with midpoint PCH voltages. I keep meaning to try minimum values, but I haven't got around to it yet myself. Like you, I feel that midpoints are probably 'safer' but other people have gone to minimum and I've not seen any reports that it causes a problem.
Z690 Hero, BIOS 3401, MEI 2345.5.3.0, ME Firmware 16.1.30.2361, 7000X Case, RM1000x PSU, i9 12900K, ASUS TUF OC 3090TI, 2 x 16GB Corsair RAM @ 5200MHz, Windows 11 Pro 23H2, Corsair H150i Elite AIO, 4x Corsair RGB fans, 3x M.2 NVME drives, 2x SATA SSDs, 2x SATA HDs.

Adrian1983
Level 10
Yeah I never had any issues with both voltages on minimum with 4 M2 drives installed, 2 x 970 Evo's and 2 x 980 Pro's it's when I added the last 1tb 980 Pro my Chipset temp seemed to increase a bit but can't remember which M2 socket I put it in now, The Strix Gaming A from memory the top M2 slot uses the CPU and the bottom 3 all use the chipset for data.

What I don't get is why is the temp increasing so much adding M2's when 99% of the time they're not doing anything! Just sitting there, The 1tb 980 Pro is my game drive and yet just by adding it to the system my system the chipset temps shot up like wtf it's idling in Windows when I'm browsing and not gaming and yet it still creeps up to 75c staring at the desktop, What a ****ty implementation.

IT_Troll
Level 10
Thanks both, that is reassuring. Once it is up to temperature I don't really see much difference between idle and load. Perhaps it is not very dynamic in it's power management.

Carlyle2020
Level 10
In the end i chose 1mm pad + paste as a replacement for the old 2mm dried up one.
96396
since i had thermal epoxy around i did stick anything on it could find.
Afterwards i used a dremel on my ASUS 3070(Noctua ed) to cut a slit into the fan shroud to make space for my extras and to fan directly on the PCH.

96397
Thanks to the marketing department having more sway than any other dept. my resell value of both my asus board and noctua card are plummeting due to hand made mods to compensate that awefull plastic and the brilliant cable binder idea.
They even cut into the PCH coolers mass to fit it nicer !

I will think of the sane engineers that nobody listened to. I feel your pain.

double post,

sorry