Which non-X570 Mobo for 3900x

[TonTom]

I’d have gone for the Mortar max if going the B450 route.

 

[LiE]

That's really useful to know, I think in that case I will keep the X570 and pay the £40 to get the block for the chipset.

Chipset block is now on my X570 Aorus Elite. Idles about 27c and doesn't really move from there.


Here's the chip in question.

Block installed.

Would only fit if the GPU is water cooled.

 

[orbitalwalsh]

@LiE Beautiful as ever !

 

[EsaT]

Chipset block is now on my X570 Aorus Elite. Idles about 27c and doesn't really move from there.

Did thermal paste used for chipset look like real thermal paste or some thick dried layer of used up bubble gum?

At least here someone clearly found bubble gum from under HSF:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/e3vgka/psa_dropped_x570_chipset_temp_15c_by_replacing/ffwlv4n/

 

[LiE]

Did thermal paste used for chipset look like real thermal paste or some thick dried layer of used up bubble gum?

At least here someone clearly found bubble gum from under HSF:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/e3vgka/psa_dropped_x570_chipset_temp_15c_by_replacing/ffwlv4n/

I didn’t see much of anything in terms of TIM. Mine now has Kryonaut.

 

[EsaT]

I didn’t see much of anything in terms of TIM. Mine now has Kryonaut.

Well, no paste at all would certainly beat them using some Thermal Insulation Material in there...

Once had one Asus board from which I read about having "less than optimal" stuff under chipset heatsink and it sure looked like some old dried bubble gum/powder already when factory fresh...
All 2mm or around that of it...
Well, guess that couldn't have ever broken down over time to any worser conductivity, if highest stability was choosing criteria.

Carbonaut should certainly check also that absolute stability requirement.
I wonder if anyone has tried that on chipset.

 

[voidshatter]

there's no way in this world I would stick a RyZen 3000 chip in anything lower than an X570 board.

Funny enough, I deliberately "downgraded" from X570 to B450 for my 3950X. Now I can sleep well after getting rid of that chipset fan! No benchmark number is worth my sleep.

Same for my 3700X - lessons learnt - instead of wasting time with X570, I bought B450 straight away. No need nightmare from DFI NF4.

 

[Jamin280672]

Funny enough, I deliberately "downgraded" from X570 to B450 for my 3950X. Now I can sleep well after getting rid of that chipset fan! No benchmark number is worth my sleep.

Same for my 3700X - lessons learnt - instead of wasting time with X570, I bought B450 straight away. No need nightmare from DFI NF4.

Good luck with that, I'd never trust the higher end Ryzen 3000s (3900 or 3950) in a B450 of all boards, especially watching reviews of the poor vrms, you've also lost pci-e 4, and 16 pci-e lanes.

 

[voidshatter]

Good luck with that, I'd never trust the higher end Ryzen 3000s (3900 or 3950) in a B450 of all boards, especially watching reviews of the poor vrms, you've also lost pci-e 4, and 16 pci-e lanes.

3950X on paper is not more power hungry than 2700X so I wouldn't worry. The same B450 motherboard ran fine for my 2700X without a single glitch. All the trouble just came with the unnecessary PCI-E 4.0.

Point of failure by non-standard chipset fan is far worse - it's a guaranteed ticking bomb. You'll end up having burning temperature when the fan fails without you noticing crippled performance until you smell something funny

I would never tolerate more than two moving parts in any of my rig (e.g. one fan for CPU and one fan for GPU and everything else fanless), especially those poor non-standard fans.

 

[Jamin280672]

3950X on paper is not more power hungry than 2700X so I wouldn't worry. The same B450 motherboard ran fine for my 2700X without a single glitch. All the trouble just came with the unnecessary PCI-E 4.0.

Point of failure by non-standard chipset fan is far worse - it's a guaranteed ticking bomb. You'll end up having burning temperature when the fan fails without you noticing crippled performance until you smell something funny

I would never tolerate more than two moving parts in any of my rig (e.g. one fan for CPU and one fan for GPU and everything else fanless), especially those poor non-standard fans.

Chipset fans on motherboards have been used for years, DFI NForce4 as you stated yourself, also pretty much identical fans in every laptop you buy, I'm not worried about them at all......in all honesty, I can't remember the last time a had or saw a fan fail and certain boards if you're that worried you can replace with water blocks anyway, even boards with a heat pipe can be pretty easily modified as the vrm on x570 doesn't get hot at all.

The only reason it needs extra cooling is because it's exactly the same chip as the io chip in the CPU, only a 14nm version made by GloFo, the one in the CPU is also made by GloFo but based on 12nm.

 

[voidshatter]

Chipset fans on motherboards have been used for years, DFI NForce4 as you stated yourself, also pretty much identical fans in every laptop you buy, I'm not worried about them at all......in all honesty, I can't remember the last time a had or saw a fan fail and certain boards if you're that worried you can replace with water blocks anyway, even boards with a heat pipe can be pretty easily modified as the vrm on x570 doesn't get hot at all.

The only reason it needs extra cooling is because it's exactly the same chip as the io chip in the CPU, only a 14nm version made by GloFo, the one in the CPU is also made by GloFo but based on 12nm.

I got rid of watercooling in all my rigs because of pesky noise from the pumps typically after 1-2 years of usage.

Also, are you aware that when you try to overclock the RAM (even just loading XMP for merely 3600 MHz), you'd get a warning message from X570 saying that PCI-E 4.0 may get unstable? Secure Boot is also broken for Asus X570 ITX. Everything in X570 just looks like immature technology and is not suitable for me.

 

[Jamin280672]

I got rid of watercooling in all my rigs because of pesky noise from the pumps typically after 1-2 years of usage.

Also, are you aware that when you try to overclock the RAM (even just loading XMP for merely 3600 MHz), you'd get a warning message from X570 saying that PCI-E 4.0 may get unstable? Secure Boot is also broken for Asus X570 ITX. Everything in X570 just looks like immature technology and is not suitable for me.

Yes ive seen that warning before, however, although it warns you of that, thats not actually what happens, hence "May get disabled", im running a 3900X on an MSI X570 ace with 32gb (4x8gb) G.skill Trident Z Royal Silver, its rated for 3600mhz CL18, but runs happily all day long at 3733mhz with my 3900X, however, its only at 3733mhz because the fabric on my 3900X wont do 1900mhz, when I had my 3800X the fabric would OC to 1900mhz and the ram would do 3800mhz with stock timings happily, all the time whilst maintaining PCI-e 4.0 in all situations listed above.

PCI-e 4 Benched: https://imgur.com/57d1r43

 

[Jamin280672]

Chipset block is now on my X570 Aorus Elite. Idles about 27c and doesn't really move from there.

Here's the chip in question.

Block installed.

Would only fit if the GPU is water cooled

With your GPU watercooled, you could vertically mount it, I see you have the brackets there for it, you'd just need a riser cable, it might of made the tubing to the chipset block a bit easier, just an idea, looks good though.

This is what im using, its not really built for my case, but works fine, I should be using the Fractal Design one, but its been out of stock everywhere, forever: https://www.overclockers.co.uk/phan...-riser-cable-90-degree-adapter-cm-02p-pt.html
I could probably drill the case and put a couple of stand-off's in to secure the cable in place, but TBH, I cant be bothered and as its only light, its fine just hovering there.

 

[LiE]

With your GPU watercooled, you could vertically mount it, I see you have the brackets there for it, you'd just need a riser cable, it might of made the tubing to the chipset block a bit easier, just an idea, looks good though.

This is what im using, its not really built for my case, but works fine, I should be using the Fractal Design one, but its been out of stock everywhere, forever: https://www.overclockers.co.uk/phan...-riser-cable-90-degree-adapter-cm-02p-pt.html
I could probably drill the case and put a couple of stand-off's in to secure the cable in place, but TBH, I cant be bothered and as its only light, its fine just hovering there.

Yea I did look at that and I may mount it vertically at some point, maybe when I upgrade the GPU towards the end of the year.

 

[voidshatter]

Yes ive seen that warning before, however, although it warns you of that, thats not actually what happens, hence "May get disabled", im running a 3900X on an MSI X570 ace with 32gb (4x8gb) G.skill Trident Z Royal Silver, its rated for 3600mhz CL18, but runs happily all day long at 3733mhz with my 3900X, however, its only at 3733mhz because the fabric on my 3900X wont do 1900mhz, when I had my 3800X the fabric would OC to 1900mhz and the ram would do 3800mhz with stock timings happily, all the time whilst maintaining PCI-e 4.0 in all situations listed above.

PCI-e 4 Benched: https://imgur.com/57d1r43

These numbers for SSD are impressive! Though I'm not a content creator so I don't need that throughput. Also 250GB looks like EVO series (TLC). If you do a continuous writing of 600GB+ data you might not be able to sustain a throughput as high as that burst number (far below saturation of PCI-E 4.0). These benefit (of burst numbers only, not sustained numbers) don't give me any advantage for my use case even if I'm a content creator, so the extra risk of uncertainty brought by the little fan is not worth it for me.

 

[voidshatter]

I know people here might say only noobs watch this, but I do agree with points made by Linus Tech Tips (and anyone who had experience since DFI NF4 might agree):

... major downside of the X570 platform: the active cooling usually in the form of a small fan required to control the heat output of the motherboard chipset. It's a real bummer for me to see this cooling trend come back because tiny proprietary cooling fans tend to be one of the least reliable components in a PC, which means that if it fails, the best case is that your jury-rigging a cooler to limp along; and the worst case is that your motherboard throttles your performance or cooks itself before you realise that anything is wrong. Unfortunately this cooling is a necessary evil, apparently due to the additional power required by PCI Express Gen 4.

 

[EsaT]

Point of failure by non-standard chipset fan is far worse - it's a guaranteed ticking bomb. You'll end up having burning temperature when the fan fails without you noticing crippled performance until you smell something funny

Asus sure screwed up (or purposely screws consumers?) with their tiny heatsink, if that name can be applied for that piece of tinfoil, in super bad position.
(nice to see design hasn't improved much from Athlon boards of 15 years ago)
But Gigabyte and MSI boards are capable to semi-passive cooling with actual good size heatsink farther from graphics card's heat.

 

[orbitalwalsh]

Just remember , better the thermal paste used, the warmer the heatsink will get due to more heat transfer

in theory if heatsink heats up quick, you've got good transfer - if it cools down quickly after use , you've got good heat dissipation

maybe with rise of next gen consoles pushing PCIe 4.0 m.2's more and node decrease for memory modules - people will start running multiple m2 units in x570/670 boards and get the chipset hot

 

[ubersonic]

Funny enough, I deliberately "downgraded" from X570 to B450 for my 3950X. Now I can sleep well after getting rid of that chipset fan! No benchmark number is worth my sleep.

Maybe you should have just RMA'd the board and got a working one. The PCH fans only run under high load, and you usually need a lot of PCI-E devices running to trip them. If yours was running audibly when you weren't even using the computer then something was wrong.

 

[voidshatter]

Maybe you should have just RMA'd the board and got a working one. The PCH fans only run under high load, and you usually need a lot of PCI-E devices running to trip them. If yours was running audibly when you weren't even using the computer then something was wrong.

It's not causing excessive noise for me. I simply don't trust it to be able to last long enough (5+ years) without breaking down. I'm a big fan of fanless wherever possible. This is OCD caused by prior experience of numerous failed fans over the last 23 years of using computers. The chipset fan alone is bad enough for me to get rid of it at all cost, no matter how good the performance is. Having to replace a motherboard is the worst thing to do for repairing a computer, as this usually means messing up the health of the installed operating system as well. I've got no time for this kind of ****.

Story for my previous PSU Corsair AX860i taken as an example: Most of the time the fan did not spin up at low load; however, after 21 months of usage, the fan developed noise whenever the fan was in the transition state of starting to spin and stopping to spin. This was particularly annoying when I was starting/stopping games or even web browsers, as I'm fussy with noise. After that, I got rid of all my PSUs with fans, and have been using only fanless PSUs since then.

Simple rules: I never trust unnecessary moving parts again, including watercooling pumps, mechanical hard drives etc. Only two moving parts are allowed: 1 fan for CPU and 1 fan for GPU.