X870 and cooling

Hardware Hub Motherboards
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The question is kinda clunky, but hear me out.

I have built a 9900x system with a MSI x870 Tomahawk board. And used a Lian Li SUP01 case:

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With no GPU. Meaning that the mobo doesn’t have any air blowing at it (apart from a small decorative fan from the Arctic Freezer III).

It shouldn’t matter. Yes. That was my first thought.

But here’s the thing. I have been bugging out this build for a month now. And my last problem to figure out is the BT working like dog sh…outing at a tree - I have quite a bad reception (it takes headphones 5-15+ seconds to get discovered, and even then I randomly get sound distortion. If I connect a wireless mouse, the distortion seems to become constant).

And here’s the catch. Today I tried Windows-to-GO, from a separate m.2 enclosure.

And the problem didn’t show itself for an hour + of me torturing the system with prime95/occt/and similar, while listening to YT and using that mouse. The system performed flawlessly.

Yes. The first (and by the law of “the simplest explanation is most likely the one”) the assumption is that Fedora 41/kernel have poor support for that BT chip (I will be posting this on Fedora’s forum).

But one thing I noticed is the enclosure (a good beefy metal enclosure) was quite warm (I would even say “hot”) to the touch. And I didn’t even do any specific writing to it (only windows was doing windows stuff).

(also a possibility that the slot I used for that drive was one of those, that uses lanes blahblahblah).

So the question is - is it possible? (today is saturday and I don’t want to spend the rest of it playing with fans, pc disassembly and actually be a lazy bread muffin).

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Sure, it’s possible. Even a single fan, at low RPM (like 400-800), constant, just generally pointed at the motherboard will add a bunch of cooling to the various components on the board. A little bit goes a long way, in this case. The other possibility is that the case is somehow shielding the bluetooth signal, but that would be more of a freak thing. The best way to test that would be to take the mobo out of the case, just lay it on the table, and see if the BT issue persists. Even when it gets warm.

1 Like
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Nah. When I plugged Windows, the BT behaved like an actually good product.

I am more and more returning to this thought. Maybe some small short or something. But after running windows on it, I crossed out that version.

Will try to add a fan to see where that leads me.

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Alright, crossing out this theory. Even moved the m.2 to a different slot (it did, however, became better, but not sure…).

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So then it’s not about cooling probably?

The mediatek WiFi/BT module that you probably have (most AMD motherboards do) is probably badly supported on linux. And the WiFi 7 one is only very recently supported on linux, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s just flaky drivers. Since you’re on fedora you have a recent kernel any way but if you want to try the bleeding edge stuff:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Kernel_Vanilla_Repositories

Most newer GPUs don’t spin the fan unless necessary. And when necessary it’s probably even adding heat rather than cooling. But, do you not have any case fans? If not I’d probably add some to get some airflow over RAM, to feed the CPU cooler, etc.

Yeah, mine does the same. In principle thats ‘good’ since that’s the case itself dissipating heat from the SSD.

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I have cross thoughts on that one. Windows was on an outside m.2 enclosure, meaning that it wasn’t using the default m2 lanes, nor did it generate heat towards the mobo (and I managed to get the same model drive as the one, used in the system. And by the feel of the actually good enclosure, I can say it does run quite warm).

I also went towards this theory, and did two experiments. In one I added two fans blowing directly at the lower side of the board. No changes.

In the second experiment, I moved the m2 to the bottom slot. Can’t say (although have suspicions) that it made a difference.

I think this is the case. And I’ll have to somehow work around it. Here the problem is that I didn’t anticipate such a scenario(as always), and bough an interesting small case, which wasn’t really designed to use pci slots (except the gpu). Will need to look for an actually good usb dongle.

Thank you. This could be a solution, but my linux knowledge is far from the level where I would try tinkering with the kernel. This is a pc, which I built for work, and can’t actually have it unstable.

My fear here was that the mobo is defective. So in regards to this I actually happy I got a negative result.

You are right on this one. But I actually just before writing this question realized that it is the first time there is literally no air pushed towards the mobo. And then I remembered Asrock or someone specifically made a fan for amd series chipsets.

This is the thing. This case, for whatever reason, went with a design, where you don’t even have the mounting points to have a fan in that section. And this isn’t some cheap looks only brand - it’s Lian Li. So I went with their understanding of the topic.

And the dimensions are specifically made to host an aio. And even have a Velcro strip on the side, explicitly waiting for the tubes.

Thanks. Crossing out ‘my m.2 drive runs hot’ from the list of things to worry about.

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The wifi/bt chip should be on an m.2e slot under some bracket on the motherboard (where the antenna connections are). In general it should be replaceable (though it’s a bit finicky). Depends on your confidence, personally I would be a bit daunted doing it on a brand new motherboard that’s under warranty still, but it’s an option.

Or you could wait it out until (if) drivers improve…

I had some issues with my mediatek wifi6e chip (x670) but they appear to be solved by now thanks to kernel upgrades.

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Yes, I think it will be wiser just to get a usb bt module for now, and wait till things improve.

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Not familiar to this case
Were any fans already included? Any additional installed? [position(s)]

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Yesterday I checked (despite saying “no, today we rest!”) the m.2 lane to be the cause by connecting the windows-to-go m.2 drive to the mobo.

I was running three things in parallel:

  1. AIDA exteme (to make the cpu, ram and overall mobo thingies hot)
  2. CrystalDiskMark (to get the m.2 hot).
  3. Floorp with a lofi mix yt video.

By this extent, I can say that it’s definitely not a hardware issue with the mobo heating up and throttling.

But as to answer this question specifically.

The design of this case is kinda cool from one side, and is questionable from the other.

The thing is - mobo sits somewhere in the middle of the case, having the aio(or even a custom loop) sitting in the back. And from the front you can install only “low profile” pci-e cards.

The GPU has a separate “construction” in the front, sitting vertically.

And, as a result, there aren’t any mounting points to have aimed at the front of the mobo, which would provide air flow.