Keep Cool(er)
I got several emails from readers complaining about motherboards on which you cannot use several kinds of CPU coolers because of capacitors or other components mounted too close to the socket. As there is no real standard for the spacing between socket and the surrounding components, I'm not quite sure if it would be right to blame the motherboard companies for that. For the time being, I will include tests with several different coolers in every motherboard round up. I'm not going to remove a motherboard from my recommendations list if one out of maybe five coolers cannot be used. Only if certain components are placed too close to the socket that hardly any cooler can be used, I will have this have an influence on the test result. Here are the coolers which I used:
This model can easily be fixed with a little hook, but this hook is interfering with the first DIMM socket of the Gigabyte, MSI and Shuttle boards.
That's one of the larger coolers we have. Originally it was designed for Athlon or Duron systems, but I decided to use it for this round up as well.
The third one is a standard cooler with Papst fan.
