[Fozzik]

It's not about being sensitive...it's a legit drawback that most motherboard makers are getting rid of.

Main reasons active cooling on the motherboard is bad:
1. High-RPM small fan is usually noisy (if not at first, they get noisy over time).
2. the little fans are extremely cheap in construction most of the time, and are prone to failure (passive cooling never fails...well unless it just falls off the chip or something).

Reasons such fans fail more often then other fans:
1. Cheap contruction
2. high RPM

Honestly, a lot of times those little active coolers don't even do any better of a job cooling than a well-designed heatsink (heatpipes can also be a big help when well designed). If you have the choice between a board with or without a fan, I really don't see how you wouldn't go with the passive cooling almost every time.

It isn't a huge drawback, just a minor one. I wouldn't have the motherboard in my recommendation if I didn't think it was overall a good board. I've had plenty of motherboards with active cooling in the past, and although they do tend to get loud (and fail) over time, it hasn't been that big a deal to replace them. Not too big a deal...but avoiding it completely by getting passive cooling is nice.

[evilsofa]

Two very good motherboards that have good passive cooling on both the northbridge and southbridge are the Biostar Tforce965PT and the MSI P965 Platinum.

[Fozzik]

That MSI board was actually part of two of my recommended machines for quite a while.

I felt like the added flexibility of the second X16 PCI-Express slot was nice to have. Plus I like the ECS board's price tag and I'm pretty confident in the chipset. It's a close thing, really...there are lots of decent boards out there, and as you said in another thread, there likely isn't a perfect one except the one that works for you.