EVGA X58 SLI Micro LGA1366 Motherboard Review

Heat & Acoustical Testing

Up to this point, we have absolutely nothing positive to say about any of the X58 motherboard cooling options we have tested. Check that, there is one board that hasn't disappointed, it also happens to be the only X58 board we have looked at with active cooling on the north bridge...definitely not a coincidence. Seeing as the X58 SLI Micro is completely passively cooled, we don't expect to have any change in results from previous motherboards.

The one positive item of this board is that none of the heat sinks are attached to each other as we can see in the photos above, changing one means just changing one. Say you wanted to just cool the north bridge with water, all you would have to do is remove the north bridge heat sink. Too many motherboards have a heat pipe conglomeration that forces the end user to change all three heat sinks should they want to water cool a single component, for this, we praise EVGA.

Like previous EVGA X58 motherboards, we have been unable to monitor the X58 chipset temperatures in Windows. We can see the temperature in the BIOS but that does us no good, so instead we will have to focus on the PWM which is pictured above. The six phase PWM design consists of lowRDS(on) MOSFETs and R36 inductors. This should equate to a rather low temperature PWM, even without much airflow. The most interesting aspect of this PWM is the fact that the same components are used for the VTT PWM shown in the second photo. The intriguing part is the lack of any heat sinks on these MOSFETs. To be honest, we are shocked and are almost certain this will hold back the VTT voltage one can use with this motherboard and potentially the reason our memory overclocks were held back. The memory clocking issue didn't feel temperature related but with no heat sinks on these MOSFETs, temperatures will definitely be higher than they should on them with any amount of VTT pushed through the CPU. In fact, we killed our original X58 3X SLI motherboard when pushing memory on it due to a lack of cooling on these vary components. Again, we strongly recommend against high frequency memory with the X58 SLI Micro.

The above photos outline our two setups, on the left, the setup labeled as 1 Fan, and on the right, the setup labeled as 2 Fans in the chart below. Basically we have added a second fan to the existing single CPU heat sink fan which blows air over the memory, but this fan also aids the north bridge, south bridge, and PWM heat sink by blowing air across the motherboard. We have used a typical 120mm 2200RPM fan for the second fan, so nothing crazy. As we will soon see, the results are pretty drastic in the cooling abilities between the two setups. We use a quick 20 minute OCCT stress test to apply our load and use the logging capabilities of Everest Ultimate to track our temperatures into a CSV file.

Let's break this down in stages, first the blue line that represents our "Stock" settings of 133x23 and default vCORE with memory set to the XMP profile of the Mushkin Redline Ascent memory. With just the single fan on the TRUE, the temperatures aren't great, but definitely not too bad considering the passive cooling on the PWM heat sink. The temperature holds steady at about 62C once the heat sink warms up. This is acceptable albeit a little on the high side for some. We would expect this temperature to fall greatly with even the slightest bit of case air flow. Keep in mind, we are on an open bench with complete stagnant air aside from what the CPU heat sink fan is moving.

The orange bar depicts the same "Stock" settings but with the second fan added over the memory, obviously the cooling ability of the motherboard heat sinks improves drastically. The temperature of the PWM never crosses 50C and as soon as the load stops, the PWM temperature drops right back to the idle temp it previously was. It won't take much to see this type of cooling capacity and we highly encourage everyone running an X58 setup to have some sort of low RPM fan blowing over the setup like we have. The memory benefits, and the motherboard clearly does as well.

Moving on to the "Overall Overclock" settings we can see that the single fan setup doesn't finish the OCCT 20 minute stability test. In fact, it doesn't even get half way through the load portion of the test. The PWM temperatures creep up to 90C and then the system locks up. This could also be a result of the NB temperatures as well because that heat sink - along with the south bridge heat sink - is skin burning hot at that point. Clearly with a heavy overclock, the system completely fails to cope with the heat being produced without additional cooling help for the heat sinks.

The white line in the chart shows our two fan setup with our "Overall Overclock" from the benchmarking and overclocking section. Adding the second fan not only allows the setup to complete stability testing, it also keeps the temperature of the PWM in check barely crossing the 75C mark. The north bridge and south bridge heat sinks also benefit greatly from this additional airflow as they are nowhere near as warm as the setup without the additional fan.

The numbers don't lie, like every other passively cooled X58 motherboard, the motherboard cooling solution fails miserably without additional cooling help when the system is overclocked. We obviously wouldn't be able to overclock this system anywhere near where we have without that additional cooling. This is definitely important information when deciding on a case and cooling setup for the EVGA X58 SLI Micro. If you are running stock settings, then this motherboard cooling is more than adequate...and 100% silent.