I thought you had another board you were comparing to this one, sorry. The D510MO just became available here but I forgot they've been available in other locales for some time.
Since you've got another one and that no one else posted temps, could you say whether your think mine are in line with yours or if one of us might have an outlier? I assume you haven't got my Morex case but I also posted open case equilibrium temperatures at the BIOS screen.
My main purpose in posting those temps is to allow us to compare cases but it's no good if my board is an outlier.
Now I would like some clarification: I can't ratify
...
I'll try to clarify by paraphrasing myself but I think we've simply got different perspectives because we've got different goals.
When I was only looking at horizontal temperatures without a guideline, the SB seemed too hot. Now that I know it's supposed to be hot and that I discovered that the vertical temperatures were much lower, it seems acceptable.
Also, based on what Intel claims, the priority (at least for open cases) as far as cooling is concerned is the "regulator area", not the SB chip. It seems to me that improving the heatsink or its connection with the CPU has more potential.
Yes, cooler is better. But there's such a thing as good enough in my book, especially for cheap, crippled systems. The temperatures are not the worst thing about this board (depending on your application).
Of course I would prefer a cooler SB and of course we can do better but the bottom line for me is whether this guy made the right call:
It's an engineer who is willing to risk reliability over shaving a few pennies of the price of a product they sell by the tens of thousands to OEM's.
How much worse is the reliability going to be for the hot SB? If it would result in 2% of board failures per year for instance (this is by no strech of the imagination an estimate, just a random example), I'd rather leave the SB alone for the time being. It it was more like 10% per year then yeah, I'd want to fit some kind of heatsink on it. I kind of trust Intel's people by default and I realize I may make a fool of myself by doing so but it's no big deal really: these boards are cheap parts and the downtime cost in case of a failure for my application would be very small as well. So I'm inclined to risk it.
Now, if you happen to know that Intel made a bad call and if you have data to back your claim, I'd be very interested in your reasoning. I'm willing to believe Intel messed up on this one and I'm open to tweaking these boards. I just need a more rational grounds than simple perfectionism. Can you actually estimate failure rates for these components (I sure can't)?
Since I can't post, I'm EDITing this in:
D510MO, T3310 and a hard-drive
This'll give one more argument to crisspy. I've mounted an old mechanical hard-drive (single.platter 5400.2) in the "stock position". This location is not ideal in that it obstructs airflow somewhat. I didn't get out of my way to use short cables and to position them so as to preserve airflow but the preliminary result I get is bad: vertical idle temps have gone up by slightly less than 4 and 3 degrees which is a lot compared to the increase I got for computing primes, especially when one looks at the "regulator area" temperature.
Worse: when the hard-drive heats up because it's stressed, it seems to be heating the board a bit (it's in the way of the air intake). I doubt this can be fully explained by the load disk access puts on the board because it also happens with SMART self-tests. At CPU load, with a hotter baseline, the effect seems smaller but it still there. The effect is barely significant (with this drive) so I don't want to overstate it.
The good news is that the drive itself remains fairly cool at idle even though it's very close to hot components and hard-monted to a metal case (35C according to SMART or 14C above ambient). Suprisingly, the temperature reported by SMART barely responds to CPU load when the drive remains idle.
Due to the reduced case airflow, the boards warms significantly more in response to CPU load when a hard drive is mounted however: +9.5C and +6.5C. My main concern with the use of a 2.5'' drive is therefore its effect on the already hot "voltage regulator" area (+5.5C at CPU load compared to the diskless temperature).
When the board is laid horizontally, the hard drive seems to have the same effect on board temperatures but the drive also gets cooked: 50C idle.
Note: I haven't allowed as much time for the temperatures to stabilize in this particular case as I did in the others and it may be that the system would have heated up one or two degrees more if I had. I doubt it but I can't rule it out.