Heat & Acoustical Testing

The name of this section is a bit misleading. The acoustical testing for this motherboard is...well, non-existent and this is because of a very simple reason: the chipset is silent. In the features section it was discussed at length that the Pin-Fin Thermal Module is a silent chipset cooling solution and we can confirm that with no fan running, the motherboard is completely silent. Now since the motherboard is silent, we expected some sort of disadvantage when it came to cooling the Intel X48 north bridge and ICH9R south bridge. We decided to do a quick comparison of the chipset temperatures with the 120mm fan hanging above the memory as seen in the setup photos, and without that fan there leaving the Pin-Fin Thermal Module responsible for all the cooling by itself. Again, we rely on the stable overclocked setup to provide the stress with 1.45v going to the northbridge, here is how the board performs:

To record the temperatures above, we simply recorded the PC Probe II reported temperatures at twenty minute intervals throughout the two hour test. It is obvious that the passive heatsink and heat pipe solution on the Rampage Formula benefits from some active cooling, but it is also evident that it doesn't suffer too much without any help at all in about 22C~23C ambients. The average delta between actively cooled and passive is about 13C~14C but the chipset never went over 50C at any point when passively cooled. Personally, a recommendation of making sure some sort of airflow finds its way to the large Pin-Fin Thermal Module isn't a bad idea if you mount this motherboard in a case. It won't take much and will be just fine without any airflow at all.