Pcie_slot_1 on the x570 steel legend is perfectly position that a >2 slot gpu will restrict airflow to the south bridge fan. I have been overclocking memory lately and have noticed that I was more stable when I first turned on my PC and stability became progressively worse the longer I was tuning. I usually hadn’t loaded my gpu OC while doing so, but had after using mw2 as a stability test after my memtest passed (DMZ seems to crash occasionally even when stable). When I proceeded to try to tighten timings afterwards. I noticed I was getting timing stable that had errors previously. I was certain of it. So I started trying to figure out why and boom. The gpu fans were now spinning pushing air to the obstructed south bridge cooling fan intake. I then proceeded to redo all of my efforts of tuning my ram while the gpu fans were not at zero and booyeah! Glass ceilings shattered. Not saying you will have the same experience, but if you are running the x570 steel legend with a 2+slot card. You are likely choking your chipset cooler. I have heard prominent overclockers ridicule motherboards with chipset cooling fans as if they are not necessary and a gimmick. That may be the case for many of most. Not so with this board. While trying to verify my findings, the chipset heat sink is noticeably hot when the gpu fans are off. I hope this helps someone with this board who is having issues with ram overclocking. I have a Ryzen 5600 non x and some bargain bin 3200c16 hynix CJR. I was very unimpressed with my hardware until realizing the chipset was so temp sensitive. Now I running this trash binned ram at 4012c18 with decent timings with good bandwidth and latency. I’m getting over 57k read with 56ns on a junk bin. PBO curve optimized with a smidge of blck and there is zero performance left on the table.

1 Comment

  1. Noxious89123

    That is surprising, I wouldn’t have thought the temperature of the PCH would affect RAM overclocking.

    I’ve got an X570 CH8 Dark Hero which has passive chipset cooling, and it just cooks along all day at about 70°C.

    I intend to replace the thermal pad with some good quality thermal putty at some point in the future, as I’m sure the pad has degraded; it used to sit much closer to 60°C when I first got the board.

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