SFF.Network LowVolu.me Episode 24 - Ryzen, Vega and GTX 1080 Ti, Oh my!

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King of Cable Management
Sep 26, 2015
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Re: the heatsinks...the discussion with Raja over functional heatsinks was in more of a general sense, not specific to the chipset. As for ITX design, Asus needs to allocate two design teams to an ITX project (versus the standard one) to handle the complexities of board design in a very limited area.
 

jeshikat

Jessica. Wayward SFF.n Founder
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Feb 22, 2015
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Interesting, so even VRM heatsinks are a bit unnecessary?
 

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King of Cable Management
Sep 26, 2015
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759
I wouldn't go so far as to say they are unnecessary...just that design has taken precedence over functionality. We do see a lot of the lower cost boards go without even VRM heat sinks, though...
 

Phuncz

Lord of the Boards
SFFn Staff
May 9, 2015
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Interesting, so even VRM heatsinks are a bit unnecessary?


ASRock Fatal1ty Z170 Gaming-ITX/ac
8 Power Phase design



ASRock H170M-ITX/ac
6 Power Phase design



One can overclock, the other cannot. One costs $175 the other one costs $80.

It seems fair to say for normal use, you won't need VRM heatsinks on your motherboard. But I would still deem a chipset heatsink useful as it will depend on your cooling in general. If you're benchmarking, you can often also see an increase in the PCH temperature. I'd hazard a guess this is due to the CPU heatsink producing warm air that makes contact with the PCH heatsink. Though a bare chip would not have any good way to deal with excess heat enough. And when the PCH is stressed (think storage and additional PCIe sockets) along with the CPU, this might be a problem when it wouldn't have a heatsink.
 

jeshikat

Jessica. Wayward SFF.n Founder
Silver Supporter
Feb 22, 2015
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Hmm, I wonder what the minimum effective heatsink is? Because I know the VRM heatsinks on the Z270I Strix are causing issues with the coolers like the LP53.
 

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King of Cable Management
Sep 26, 2015
775
759
If you want it orientation agnostic, then a pin-fin design heat sink would probably be the smallest, unless you wanted to have a flat heat pipe moving the thermal energy to a metal I/O cover, ala ROG RVE. If you know the direction of the airflow over the heatsink, however, you can make it a little smaller that a pin-fin still with a finned heat sink (more surface area, but orientation dependent).
 
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jeshikat

Jessica. Wayward SFF.n Founder
Silver Supporter
Feb 22, 2015
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For now, we do plan to revive the traditional podcast hosting, eventually.
 
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