I find these measurements interesting, he measured power at under 8 watts, less than I have been hearing as the reason for the active chipset coolers, but there is more that this board could be doing, would you get the 11w or 15w if all the PCI slots and NVME were populated? + 6 sata drives? and a lot of USB 3 traffic? could 15W be an accurate worst case that must be designed for?
I find the return of chipset fans annoying, back in my socket A days you got as little as a year out of the crap 40mm northbridge fans before the cheap sleeve (plain) bearings let go and they made a lot of noise or just ground to a halt, and online you went $20 later you get something to replace it, either a better heatsink with fan or a large passive cooler (my favorite solution) finding something with the right hole pattern was always annoying or you can to epoxy it on witch is permanent, better hope you selected enough cooling because its a one way trip.
if the power is only typically 8w a decent passive cooler will always be more reliable than a fan and much preferable IMO.
Gigabyte has one Motherboard that is passively cooled but it is north of $500 from what I hear.
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