Legit Reviews

At the start of the Intel Developer Forum I saw a ton of Intel DX58SO 'Smackover' motherboards running just a passive chipset cooler on the Intel X58 Express chipset. An example of this is from the Kingston booth:
Or this backup motherboard that I managed to get my hands on for some up close and personal shots that you can't do in the computer case.
After talking to a number of Intel employees at IDF and from actually touching this passive chipset cooler while the system was running found that it runs fairly hot. Near the end of IDF I started to spot these:
It seems that Intel has developed an active cooler that attaches on top of the chipet heat sink for better cooling. Active cooling really help lower the temperatures on the Intel DX58SO platform as you could only imagine.
Here is another look at the active cooler...
Here is another system with the active cooling installed. The heat sink pictured in this system and the one in the very first picture at the kingston booth are using the Intel retail boxed heat sink that will come with all of the Core i7 processors. The 3.2GHz Extreme Edition processor will come with a bigger heat sink and I have yet to spy one of those.

wow that seems like a pretty bad placement of the 8 pin cpu power connector

martini161 wrote:wow that seems like a pretty bad placement of the 8 pin cpu power connector

Intel never did care about the placement of connectors. Another sign of this "attitude" is that they knew this board would use "3 channel" memory, but they still put 4 memory slots on the board.

active cooling

Dandruff wrote:active cooling

you left of the word "owns" at the end of your sentence