Official Water Cooling Thread of the Stock Maximus SE ROG NB Club:

[jonny_ftm]

I think I am still sold on the stock ROG cooling so far. I also like raju's advice on using a fan/water combo to cool the Maximus.
I think my TJ09 case, with it's 'open air flowing nature' should help me to have good temps...
I am not sold on the remount yet until I see exactly what temps I get, and if it looks to be required.

My expierience with previous boards, is that on high OC you need to active cool your motherboard NB and mosfets
The X38 can't be an exception. The vital settings are:
- C2D CPUs will never, even past 4GHz stress your mb like a quad will do
- CPU clock and vcore: on a quadcore overclocked above 50% (that is 3.6GHz and above) will make your mosfets burn. They will in all cases be lower performers (heat and electric stability are just opposed)
- Memory speed/timings, NB strap and NB voltage, CPU clock: these will burn your NB. Now, we're talking about the most sensitive part in an overclocked PC: RAM management

So, with all this in mind, the NB and mosfets should be the coolest to be stable. If 47°C limit meets Prime errors, I will say a 5-10°C lower temperature is needed for the long run (after all, it is just a chip like a CPU, so what applies to CPUs will apply to any chipset)

Personally, when I receive a motherboard, I remove its stock cooling and at least reapply thermal compound before first run. After all, we all do this for our CPUs and debate what is the best compound (AS5, MX-1, MX-2...). SO we should do it for our chips. Any gain in temperature will lead to better OC performance like with a CPU

Just an advice for future owners of this board: before mounting it, just tune your heatsinks, especially if you plan to get>50% OC from a quadcore

Also, like with CPUs, there are poor and bad overclockers in the motherboard department, as we OC the X38, some of them will be better than others (not all quads reach 4GHz stable OC, so not all X38 would be able to stabilize it)

Wish I could help with testings, but really disappointed to see no one getting his board prime stable above 3.6GHz on the main maximus thread. And if I do remember, no one except Raju tried reseating the heatsink and cooled his motherboard well with fans. And, yep, he's quiet the best performer on high FSBs with a quadcore

At Raju: could you please, in your future X38 motherboards big review mention not only the maximum FSB on a Q6600, but the maximum stable clock speed on a Q6600. In fact, having a benchable 480MHz FSB will be unusable if the system can't get stable above 9x400 MHz on a quad core. The total speed of CPU/RAM will have a stronger stress on the NB than the FSB alone (8x400 much easier to stabilize than a 9x400, but the end user needs the 9x400). It is really strange that quiet no one is getting a Prime / F@H stable above 3.6GHz on his Q6600+Maximus