Originally Posted by
HKPolice
Just got this board and I have to say that so far I'm impressed by the design. Haven't booted it up yet, but I ripped off all the stock cooling and noticed that there was ample gray thermal paste (seems like a thicker version of MX2) on the IOH chip and the digital mosfets. Southbridge had tons of white paste. All the fins on the heatpipes were soldered on not just thermal glued like the Asus boards, and there is a 'backplate' for both the northbridge and mosfet mounting holes so that the pcb doesn't warp when pressure is applied.
That said, components used on the mobo look cheaper though. For example all the analog chokes used seem to be the iron core type, not ferrite core. Asus switched to all ferrite cores a while ago. There is only a 2 phase ram PWM circuit whereas Asus has a 3 phase.