Northbridge Coolers and such...

[w00ten]

Ok, for those of you who read the motherboard section of the overclocking area I'm sure you have seen my post on the Gigabyte K8N Pro SLI not overclocking. Success has been found by others through replacing the heatsink on the northbridge... which just plain pisses me off since the stock one barely keeps it cool enough to run stable to begin with... that should be a crim to have such a crap stock cooler. Anywho, I am lookin for suggestions on what to go with for the northbridge. It is an NForce4 SLI chipset. As well I'm looking at the Zalman CNPS8000 and the CNPS9500 for my CPU. Which would be better to go with and/or are they worth it to begin with? If someone has a different suggestion feel free to post it. I'm open to ideas. Also, whats a good idea for my graphics cards? All of this stuff is expensive too, would it perhaps cost only slightly more to go to water cooling?

Thanks for all the help guys.

 

[Mobius]

I have built 6 PCs with that exact same board - and yeah - I was distressed with the temperature of the NB chipset cooler. The passive one gets so hot it almost hurts to touch it - and the whiney nasty thing on a GA-K8NXP-9 is similarly very hot, but also very fucking noisy too! GRRR.

I have to point out here though, that apart from this single issue, Gigabyte boards are very very good! And if you don't want to overclock, then you're good to go. You can even get away with minimal airflow through the case (quiet!) and it'll stay stable - no problem.

However, if you want to overclock the living Bejesus out of a motherboard then you are somewhat stuck. Let me show and tell you what I did...

What you are looking at here is half of an old Volcano 7+ all Copper CPU heatsink, cut in half, and stragetically drilled to avoid motherboard components, and then tapped, so that I crew the thing to the motherboard from behind.

This is a very much better solution than the ACK-GRRR-FUBAR solution of Gigabyte. Although you can't see it, there is a 75 mm diameter pipe which comes directly from the 120mm inlet fan, (which also cools the HDDs) to run col air over it. Without the pipe I achieved about a 12% overclock. With it I managed a 26% OC.

With 26%, that heatsink is about as hot as the standard item - in other words, bloody hot.

I spent quite a while looking for a heat-pipe solution (Come on Manufacturers - you're all bloody useless!) but couldn't find anything that would be even remotely suitable.

Good luck!

 

[phreejak]

watercooling

 

[w00ten]

im so tempted to just tell gigabyte where to stick it and go buy a nice DFI

 

[phreejak]

If you don't like what I have to say, don't read. Being rude doesn't help anyone. especially if you have the knowledge to help out. I am not above learning from people who may have a better understanding of things than I like yourself but being condesending is just plain bad manners and certainly does help in me learning anything from someone like you.