There's a second fan on the chipset, too, so even if you opt for liquid cooling and its resulting poor local airflow on the PCB, the board is able to keep both areas relatively cool. Thankfully, the included 40mm fan here is inaudible more than a few feet away and it does seem to keep things in check - essential for a stuffy mini-ITX case. There's no software monitoring and with all the heatsink paraphernalia, it is tricky to get an accurate reading, but the surrounding area, top-side heatsink and lower heatsink never topped 50☌. Below, you can see that not only is there the usual rear-mounted M.2 port, making a pair of PCIe 4.0/SATA 6Gbps-capable M.2 ports, but Asus has included a large backplate, which cools the rear of the VRMs. It's definitely a looker, with or without RGB lighting and like most X570 efforts, Asus has spent plenty of time tweaking the PCB to cater for the toasty chipset and the potential for using a 16-core CPU here. However, with Gigabyte's effort being mediocre in a couple of areas, Asus can still grab the middle ground, but it will need to contend with the fact that the Gigabyte board can be had for less than £220, compared to the £270 here. In fact, Asus probably knew this and delayed its launch so as many people as possible bought the Impact. Of course, it already has the spectacular Crosshair VIII Impact, but retailing for £100 more and also adding more than 30mm to the length of the PCB due to its mini-DTX form factor means that this new mini Strix is likely to be a better option for most. With ASRock's X299E-ITX/AC having gone end of life and extremely difficult to get hold of, this means that one of the various AMD X570 (or indeed X470 and B450) mini-ITX boards are now a much better option if you're aiming to build a monster small-form-factor rig, and Asus has finally shown its hand with the ROG Strix X570-I Gaming. For example, getting similar grunt to its Ryzen 9 3950X means opting for the Core i9-10980XE, but it consumes 130W more under load with heat load to match. If anything, AMD's 7nm Zen 2 architecture suits the mini-ITX form factor more than any other range of CPUs right now due to the fact that AMD is cramming so much horsepower into small places, but with very low heat loads and power requirements.

Asus x570 chipset fan control