ROG Rampage VI Apex & EK monoblock question

[tannji]

I am starting on a build with the VI Apex and EKWB's EK-FB ASUS ROG R6E RGB Monoblock, and i ran into an issue immediately. The board has active cooling via heat pipe over the mosfet area and behind the I/O Connection area. This gets removed so that the monblock fits over the CPU and mosfets, and there is a passive heatsink that is supposed to mount behind the I/O, apparently to cool the Aquantia 10GB LAN processing chip. The EK monoblock is marketed as being compatible with both the Rampage VI Apex and the Extreme, but it would appear that the passive heatsink only fits the Extreme board. On the Apex the capacitors behind the I/O do not fit the cutouts in the sink, and as a result the sink can not make contact with the thermal pad provided for the Aquantia chip. Has anyone seen this or heard of a work-around?

You can see the light blue thermal pad, the the two mounting points are marked by the chrome screws lying on the board, and the heatsink is laying over the RAM DIMM slots so you can see how its shape and cutouts do not match the capacitors on the board. The instructions that come with the block show it fitting perfectly, but the board in the images is obviously an Extreme, not the Apex.

I am considering buying a cheap after-market RAM heatsink and adhesive pad, cutting to size and calling it good, but I am fairly off-put by this product issue that isn't addressed in the material, especially given that Asus and EKWB supposedly collaborated on this product.

I also wonder how necessary the heatsink is for the Aquantia 10GB chip, given that it does not seem to be cooled in the stock configuration.

Thoughts or ideas appreciated.

 

[dugdiamond]

i was also puzzled with the same problem.

my solution is...
it looks like the heat pipe can be pulled out of the larger 'IO-shield' aluminium block.
this will enable the monoblock to be fitted AND the larger IO block to be re-fitted.

 

[tannji]

I considered that, but it doesn't appear that the large sink really does anything other than make incidental contact with the tops of a few capacitors. Also, I discovered, no thanks to EKWB, that I had been slightly misled by a review or two. The Apex does NOT have the Aquantia chip that the Extreme has, but an Intel Lan chip. The passive heatsink is specifically for the Extreme board, not the Apex. I will probably have either good airflow here, or a fan specifically there for M.2 which should sort matters. Still might throw on a cheap RAM sink on top of the Intel lan chip.