[pHaestus]

The advantage to using a real motherboard for testing imo has nothing to do with heat production.

I noticed a lot of design flaws in mounting and ease of use that one will never pick out with a die simulator. In some cases pointing out these problems made me quite unpopular in the community (ppl still think I am biased against DD because I didnt recommend one of their blocks heh) but it was good information.

The downside of testing with CPU and mobos are many: heat input is poorly qualified, many failpoints on cheap electronics parts (CPUs and mobos) lead to long downtimes and lengthy recalibration/retesting, people will complain when your test platform becomes obsolete or is not the same CPU type as the flavor of the month, and in general the testing is awkward to do when a whole computer gets thrown into the mix.

In a perfect world wbs would be tested on a platform like my old one for relative performance and on a die simulator/bench testing platform for results that could go into models etc.