Noob question - what is the northbridge?

[towely]

I know, I'm a noob. But what exactly is the northbridge on the mobo? And what are northbridge cooling options? What do they do?

Thanks in advance.

Your humble servant,

Towely.

 

[Dan1317]

It's the biggest chip on your motherboard with, usually, a heat sink on it. It regulates FSB, Memory, PCIe/AGP, and CPU. Southbridge handles some of the lower bandwith things such as PCI, USB, etc. As for coolers most come with a stock heat sink. Some ones you can buy:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.asp?N=2010110062+1294418666+1057709727&Submit=ENE&SubCategory=62

Or you have the option of a heatsink and fan:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.asp?N=2010110062+1294418667+1057709727&Submit=ENE&SubCategory=62

Just be sure to clean old grease apply new thermal grease if changing.

 

[aBg_rOnGak]

I know, I'm a noob. But what exactly is the northbridge on the mobo? And what are northbridge cooling options? What do they do?

Thanks in advance.

Your humble servant,

Towely.

At some times/certain, everybody's a noob...you're humble indeed...u can have passive cooling (heatsink or even heatpipe) or active cooling (heatsink fan), but that's all i know...somebody else might explain much better/a little more though

 

[phreejak]

The northbridge controls memory functions (less with AMD systems as they have an ondie memory controller on their chip), coordinates with the PCIe and AGP lanes and bridges the gap between the CPU and system memory (ram). Typically, this chip is located somewhere just below the CPU and usually has a large heatsink on it

The southbridge usually includes controls for the usb ports, firewire ports, serial and parallel ata, agp, raid and other component connections. It is usually located to the right of the various slots (pci, pcie, etc) and has a smaller heatsink on it

 

[PaCanc]

...or, in the case of nForce4 chipsets, the NorthBridge and the SouthBridge are both in the same chip (under the CPU).

 

[phreejak]

Yeah, configurations are different for Nvidia chipsets because they are (or were) for AMD procs which have their own ondie memory controller, thus taking away a big function that the Intel chipset northbridge uses.

Good call...

 

[PaCanc]

hey, again.

I found this link:

http://www.cs.bris.ac.uk/Teaching/Resources/COMS11301/OC/Handouts/Lecture6_PCHardware_6up.pdf#search=%22CPU%20northbridge%20southbridge%20diagram%22

It's not the best you can find, but it's simple, and it's the first thing I could find.

 

[phreejak]

That's actually pretty informative so I'm going to hang on to that link.

 

[linux_0]

I'd like to add:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northbridge_%28computing%29

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southbridge_%28computing%29


As indicated above some chipsets integrate the northbridge and southbridge on the same chip.

AMD64s do of course integrate the memory controller on the die and use hypertransport to communicate between the bridges and the CPU instead of an FSB. Some AMD64s have 2 northbridges, 1 quasi-southbridge and 1 or more PCI-X bridges (see below).

Some ( embedded ) systems do not have a northbridge or southbridge -- it is sometimes all integrated into one chip (SoM).

 

[Dan1317]

nice post