AMD Phenom II X6 1090t Overclocking - Page 6

Yeah, first thing you have to do is get rid of this board.  It has pretty much the highest recorded failure rate of any board.

Don't even bother with the cooling; you should save your money for a new board ASAP.  Having the VRM cooling there might extend your lifetime but there seems to be no guarantee; the failures can happen randomly or after some time/degradation, and it's hard to predict.  Nevertheless, it's better to be safe than sorry like many, many others.

The fault in this one is capacity; it's in the choice of generally low quality parts and the 3-transistor MOSFET layout.  None of MSI's 770/870 boards can safely handle 125W TDP x4 and x6 processors, let alone overclocked.  This board has been known to fail despite cooling.

The active components you should worry about are the MOSFETs, they're the hottest running component.  The chokes are not actually fragile, active transistors - they're simple metal coils that can take on a decent amount of heat.

A good quality VRM system will use transistors in an ample layout so as to most effectively spread load between components, whether the phase count is high or not.  Higher phase count systems may sacrifice with lower quality components than lower phase count counterparts, but this not necessarily be a bad thing because each component receives less load and overall heat on the board is much less.  I usually recommend in higher phase count systems for reliability in situations where the CPU is going to be frequently loaded at 100% - i.e. if you regularly CPU transcode or edit video.

While you might like the ASUS M5A9_ boards for UEFI and interesting board features, the GIGABYTE GA-990X/970 lineup with its classic BIOS can be triumphed for great reliability.  All 990X/970 boards are equipped with some form of VRM protection (as confirmed in a recent BIOS update) in addition to ample phase counts.  Reliability when overclocking is absolutely solid.  My 990XA is about to approach 1 year of usage - the whole way through pushing a 4Ghz x6 under the stress of an NH-D14 and 4 DIMMs of RAM.