DFI LanParty UT X58-T3eH8 LGA 1366 Motherboard Review

Heat & Acoustical Testing

With no fans active on the DFI LanParty X58-T3eH8, there obviously isn't going to be any acoustic testing. What we will look at, however, is the much advertised Flame Freezer heat sink attachment that is designed to help cool the passive heat sink - in particular - the digital PWM. We will simply be running our maximum overclock again with OCCT as the method for loading the system. What we want to test for is the difference between our test setup with and without the Flame Freezer attachment, and then what happens when we remove all but the fan attached to the Thermalright Ultra-120 eXtreme cooling the CPU. Let's look at some photos of the setup first.

The photo above on the left is where we applied a small amount of thermal paste on the heat sink fins. We then mounted the Flame Freezer attachment and in the photo on the right we are showing what the attachment looks like after being mounted. Clearly there is some decent contact but we are still a bit skeptical that the cooling fins interfacing with the heat pipe of the Flame Freezer attachment with such a small surface area will have any impact on PWM temperatures.

These next two photos outline the second and third setups in the graph we are about to look at. On the left is the single fan setup and the right, our normal three fan setup. The TRUE has two 120mm Ultra Kaze's in a push/pull configuration with a third acting the role as memory cooler. The third fan also directs a lot of air down toward the NB and PWM heat sink. We feel removing this fan will definitely impact the systems temperatures.

These last two photos are just some more glamour shots of the setup during testing. Let's now go over the results of the three setups that include the three fan setup with no Flame Freezer attachment, a three fan setup with the attachment, and then a single fan setup again; with the Flame Freezer.

We were expecting some impact from the lack of fans in the third setup depicted with the blue line in the graph, but not that large of a difference. Both three fan setups hover just above and just below 70C while the single fan setup sky rockets to over 90C for the majority of the 20 minute stress test. The difference between the three fan setups with and without the Flame Freezer is minimal but there definitely seems to be a 2-3C drop with the Flame Freezer attached. The fact that we see any sort of distinct performance difference is a bit of a surprise but it does appear the Flame Freezer helps the PWM temps out marginally, nothing to get excited about but enough of a difference to make it worth attaching to the motherboard.

Our biggest concern with this testing though is the result of a single fan setup. Clearly the silent heat sink setup of the DFI X58-T3eH8 can't cope with a highly overclocked system without a bit of help. If you are mounting this system in a case for daily use, you are definitely going to want to cater your fan setup to provide the motherboard heat sink the cooling it needs. The PWM may be designed to run that hot, but we certainly don't like seeing it run that hot when a little bit of air can help out drastically.