Asus M5A97 EVO Chipsets Extremely Hot

Hey guys,
I wanted your advice on a problem I ran into.
My friend owns a pc shop and I had him order me in the Asus M5A97 EVO 970
chipset motherboard. Well a few days ago I picked it up and I installed it yesterday and it's
running great, at the same time I also added a Cooler Master TX3 and 8GB of Ripjaws to my system.

The problem is that my northbridge gets ridiculously hot and my southbridge gets pretty hot too. I'm thinking the problem is that Asus tried to make the board flashy by putting logos on the heatsinks and having the fins parallel to the board but they dissipate like shit unless there's something else causing this problem.
If I touch the northbridge more than just a quick poke I'll get burned. I have pretty good airflow in my case and I shouldn't have to buy aftermarket positional fans to try and keep these things cool, I'd like my board to last a decent while.

So I'll have to see, I sent Asus a support ticket asking them about the issue and I'm just curious if any of you guys have ran into this kind of problem. I've had chipsets that have gotten hot before but this is pretty crazy,

Thanks
-Justin

I'm running Gigabyte 990XA-UD3, also based on AMD 990X chipset. Even at idle northbridge gets quite hot, southbridge not as hot. After gaming I think that I will also not be able to mantain my fingers at NB, as you do.

How is the case airflow & cable management?

It may be too hot to touch but not necessarily too hot to be dangerous.

I have this board as well. The heatsinks get hot because that's what heatsinks without fans do.

Unless you're actually having overclocking or instability issues, here's my solution to your problem: Don't touch your heatsink and you won't get burned.

Edit: I re-read that and it sounds kinda douchey. Just kidding around! But really, I wouldn't worry. If a heatsink is hot, it's doing its job.

The chips are meant to run hot - they are very capable of running at high temperatures without any issues whatsoever and thus there is no need to have extreme cooling on them. Unless you have stability issues, everything is perfectly normal. Go touch your CPU socket (on Intel) and see how you'll get burned instantly (or a VRM for that matter).

If you have monitoring software installed, and it specifies a chipset temp (or ACPI/Temp3, I think), so long as it doesn't go over 70/80°C you're fine.

I think the 7, 8 and 9-series chipsets have a max temp of 85°-90°C.