Originally posted by: Butterbean
I'm off of Asus on next mobo. I find them too hit or miss lately and their support and site are a joke. Plus they seem to be getting carried away with all the heat pipe stuff. Intel doesn't use all that copper bling and users consistently rate the Intel stuff better than Asus all things considered. Asus is only company I know that sent out a new high end mobo (P5W DH) and then it wouldn't boot with retail conroes because it had only been tested with engineering samples. All Asus could say was "oops" and "buy a Celeron" to boot and then update Bios.
The heatpipe cooling can and probably is inferior, but it looks cool.
It's not that less heat is being moved around, or that the average component temperature won't be lower, but that typically, the temps are like so:
voltage regulators > north bridge > south bridge
So it's quite likely (IMO) that the chipset is being made hotter under load than if it was all cooled separately. Then, the annoying thing is almost no boards of any repute actually have them all cooled, but each set on their own. There's a nice SPCR thread about this, I think involving the P5K Deluxe.
I'm planning on upgrading within a couple months, and this is one of those things driving me nuts. Either a recommended mobo has these silly heat pipes connecting what should be separate heatsinks, or the VRMs have no cooling and are not arranged in a way that makes adding a heatsink easy to do.
Now, OTOH, with everything working as it should, it'll probably not become an issue...but it's still a bit unnerving.