Gigabyte Rips The Chipset Fan Off Its X570 Mini-ITX Motherboard

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This one won't blow you away

Gigabyte X570SI Aorus Pro AX
Gigabyte X570SI Aorus Pro AX (Image credit: VideoCardz)

Gigabyte has prepared a refreshed version of the company's X570-I Aorus Pro WiFi motherboard. Like the brand's other X570S motherboards, the X570SI Aorus Pro AX (via VideoCardz) arrives without an active fan that cools the chipset.

The X570SI Aorus Pro AX is based on the X570S chipset. Do bear in mind that X570S isn't a new chipset, rather it's just a way for vendors to denote X570 motherboads that don't pack the chipset fan. Since the product page for the X570SI Aorus Pro AX isn't live yet, it's unknown if Gigabyte made any more changes to the motherboard in addition to the chipset cooling.

Obviously, the X570SI Aorus Pro AX continues to be a mini-ITX motherboard. From what we can see from the renders, the motherboard may also retain the eight-phase power delivery subsystem as its X570 counterpart. However, it does seem that the heatsink now passively cools the power phases.

Barring any changes, the X570SI Aorus Pro AX should have a similar feature set as the X570-I Aorus Pro WiFi. The two DDR4 memory slots means that you can only have up to 64GB of memory on the motherboard. However, it does support memory frequencies up to DDR4-5300 and both ECC and non-ECC memory modules.

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Gigabyte X570SI Aorus Pro AX
(Image credit: VideoCardz)

One PCIe 4.0 x16 expansion slot is present on the X570SI Aorus Pro AX so you better choose your discrete graphics card option wisely. If you pair the motherboard with a Ryzen APU, then you could make good use of the DisplayPort 1.2 output and two HDMI 2.0 ports.

Storage options come down to four standard SATA III ports and two M.2 PCIe 4.0 x4 ports. There is support for RAID 0, RAID 1 and RAID 10 arrays. The frontal M.2 port is connected directly to the processor, while the rear M.2 port is linked to the X570 chipset.

The X570SI Aorus Pro AX provides one Gigabit Ethernet port and Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.0 connectivity. The motherboard offers one USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A port, four USb 3.2 Gen 1 ports and one USB 3.02 Gen 2 Type-C port at the rear panel. If you need more USB ports. the motherboard comes equipped with one USB 3.2 Gen 1 and one USB 2.0 headers.

Pricing and availability for the X570SI Aorus Pro AX is unknown for the meantime. You can find the X570-I Aorus Pro Wi-Fi in stores for $226.99 so it's plausible that the X570SI Aorus Pro AX may cost uo tp $250.

Zhiye Liu
Zhiye Liu
News Editor and Memory Reviewer

Zhiye Liu is a news editor and memory reviewer at Tom’s Hardware. Although he loves everything that’s hardware, he has a soft spot for CPUs, GPUs, and RAM.

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5 Comments Comment from the forums
  • digitalgriffin
    Needs 2.5gb Ethernet realtek at that price.
    Reply
  • spongiemaster
    digitalgriffin said:
    Needs 2.5gb Ethernet realtek at that price.
    Is there a difference between 2.5Gb realtek and the 2.5Gb Intel chip the board has?
    Reply
  • digitalgriffin
    spongiemaster said:
    Is there a difference between 2.5Gb realtek and the 2.5Gb Intel chip the board has?

    The article states 1gb lan. But there are two versions of Intel 2.5gb lan. The first is defective and can't be fixed. The second is rare as it was just released. I'm not sure which boards have the fixed Intel chip. But I'm not going to push my luck. The realtek is known to work.

    https://wccftech.com/intel-foxville-i225-v-2-5gbe-networking-issues-persist-z490-motherboards-affected/
    Reply
  • g-unit1111
    Good, I've always thought that was a very dumb and unnecessary feature. I will probably get this board for my mini ITX rig when it's available.
    Reply
  • bjnmail
    The chipset fan on the original version is absolutely useless for cooling the chipset anyway, due to how the heatsink is designed, it really only effectively cooled the NVMe drive anyway. The chipset just runs at 52C in gen3 or 65C in gen4, and the fan at the full 10,000 RPM barely makes a 1-2C dent, but will take 10-15C off the NVMe at full speed.

    Plus gigabyte already gave full control over it in userspace, so any fan control software like FanControl or Argus Monitor can turn the fan off or set the speed to respond to the NVMe drive temp, so it is actually really beneficial to have the fan for cooling the NVMe drive.

    Now if Asus would either give any fan control at all to the user for their x570i's chipset or VRM fans at all, that would be nice. They actually went so far as to put a firmware lock in the bios recently to prevent us from modding the bios to expose the fan controls that they intentionally hide (and gigabyte doesn't, so thanks gigabyte!), since it now won't allow us to flash the modded bios without using bios flashback which that board doesn't have.

    So really, this is a downgrade since you lose the NVMe cooling fan, unless it includes the better memory topology lifted from the b550-i, which would be the only benefit if so, because the chipset could already be made "passive" with about 10 seconds in software on the current x570-i board.
    Reply