New X570 BIOS Adds Fan Profiles for Chipset Fan

The one thing that really makes X570 boards stand out against previous AMD and Intel boards is that almost all of them have active cooling on the chipset, usually in the form of a small fan. The reason for this being that the X570 chipset is actually the same 12nm IO die found on Ryzen 3000 series CPUs, and while it doesn't consume much power, it consumes enough for passive cooling to be a challenge, making small fans a quick and easy solution.

The problem with these fans, however, is that they can get somewhat uncomfortable in regards to the noise. In our ASRock X570 Taichi review, for example, we didn't find the fan to be very loud, but it did get "annoying," which is obviously not ideal (though thankfully that board had manual fan control). To mitigate these noise issues with X570 chipset fans, Gigabyte has pushed out a new BIOS update for all of its X570 boards with a chipset fan to add three new chipset fan profiles.

These three profiles are "silent," "balanced," and "performance." We don't know exactly how these profiles differ yet, but we can probably assume what kind of pros and cons these profiles deliver based on the name. One thing to note, however, is that chipsets don't really benefit from more cooling like a CPU or GPU would; it's not like you're going to be overclocking your chipset and need more cooling to accomplish that. As long as the "silent" profile can keep the chipset cool enough to function, "performance" or even "balanced" fan modes seem redundant.

It is good that Gigabyte is giving users the option to choose how noisy they want their motherboard to be, but it would be nice to have manual control like the X570 Taichi, at least as an additional option. Hopefully, the behavior of the X570 chipset fan will get improved over further BIOS updates from all motherboard vendors.