- Sep 11, 2012
- 6,960
- 0
- 18,460
So I had an older motherboard around here along with a Athlon X2 3800+ that I got pretty cheap.
Just out of curiosity, I mounted a heatsink without a fan on the CPU and booted it beched without a case.
I booted a Xubuntu live cdrom with a spare cdrom drive.
It worked ok and the CPU temp was hot but not intollerable. It was around 45c idle and in the 50s under moderate load. I am sure it would overheat with full load but I was using a relatively small heatsink for passive cooling.
The problem I had was not the CPU though; but rather it was the northbridge and VRMs. During operation, I could keep my hand on the CPU heatsink but the VRMs and northbridge were very hot - almost too hot to touch within 10 minutes.
When using a standard fan cooler, they are barely warm.
So this brings the question: How do people that either use passive cooling or water cooling keep the NB and VRMs cool with the much reduced airflow around the motherboard?
Just out of curiosity, I mounted a heatsink without a fan on the CPU and booted it beched without a case.
I booted a Xubuntu live cdrom with a spare cdrom drive.
It worked ok and the CPU temp was hot but not intollerable. It was around 45c idle and in the 50s under moderate load. I am sure it would overheat with full load but I was using a relatively small heatsink for passive cooling.
The problem I had was not the CPU though; but rather it was the northbridge and VRMs. During operation, I could keep my hand on the CPU heatsink but the VRMs and northbridge were very hot - almost too hot to touch within 10 minutes.
When using a standard fan cooler, they are barely warm.
So this brings the question: How do people that either use passive cooling or water cooling keep the NB and VRMs cool with the much reduced airflow around the motherboard?
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram