Gigabyte's X870E Aorus Extreme AI TOP motherboard is suffering from high chipset temperatures, as suggested by several reports on Reddit. Chipset temperatures north of 100 degrees Celsius led a user to disassemble the motherboard, revealing poor heatsink contact on one of the two daisy-chained Promontory 21 chipsets. Now, if this does end up being a slight misalignment in the assembly phase, only a handful of units should be affected. However, a more deeply rooted issue might be more challenging to address, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.
AMD's design for the X870E links two Promontory 21 chipsets in a daisy-chained arrangement, as was the case with the X670E. Flagship 800-series and 600-series motherboards thus reveal two Promontory 21 chipsets upon removing the heatsink. Functionally, both of these chipsets are similar, though they have varying arrangements. Hardware monitoring utilities like HWiNFO thus report two different temperature readings under the chipset section.
User u/Xabiro shared a HWinFO screenshot showing their Gigabyte X870E Aorus Xtreme's second-chipset at nearly 110 degrees Celsius. Coupled with the Ryzen 9 9950X3D, the system doesn't appear to be under much load. Jumping to the comment section, another user confirmed similar problems with their unit. u/Xabiro removed the heatsink covering both chipsets to determine the underlying problem.
It quickly becomes clear that one of the chipsets isn't making any contact with the heatsink. The thermal paste applied from the factory on the right contact surface shows no deformation or contact like it was never pressed against the chipset, which also appears dry as bone. The user applied more thermal paste to eliminate any clearance between the two surfaces. This lowered the temperatures to a moderate 71 degrees Celsius. Applying a thermal pad in tandem with the thermal grease further dropped the temperatures to 64 degrees Celsius.
Ironically enough, just days after criticizing Asus' GPU quick-release implementation, a theory proposes that Gigabyte's own release lever design might be at fault here. As this lever sits below the heatsink, potentially causing slight vertical elevation, it is believed to disturb contact between the chipset and the heatsink, leading to the high temperatures we see.
Consumers expect rigorous testing and validation when paying top money for a premium top-of-the-line motherboard. However, based on the limited data and number of reports, we shouldn't jump to premature conclusions. Still, another unfortunate customer reported a similar issue with their model, so this likely isn't a one-off case.
