Hello,

I just bought the MSI p6n Diamond and am cooling the northbridge and southbridge in my water cooling loop, while cooling the mosfets with a sawn-off heatsink from the stock heatpipe that came with the board. The temperatures I recorded from the NB and SB were in the mid to high 50s, which rang the alarm on my cooling system and forced a shutdown. I called tech support for my cooling system (Koolance Exos-2 LX) and they said that my lack of a block on the mosfets was responsible for sending extra heat to the chipsets.

My two questions are: What are normal temperatures for the 680i chipset? and Do you agree with the Koolance tech that my lack of sufficient cooling on the mosfets is what is overheating my NB and SB?

Thanks.

Oh and a third question as an afterthought: what are safe temperatures for things like the cpu, NB, SB etc? While trying to get my coolant loop correct these parts easily reached temps of around 60 degrees and I want to know if they were in danger of being perma-fried.

You haven't see how hot evga 680i chipset is. Try 80'c (on one of my friend's as I was staring at the temp readout in bios; it kept going up). Don't worry about it. nvidia says it can be up to 100'c. Most stock chipset cooling will get you 60'c-ish. After I replaced the chipset cooling with the one in my sig & another one from Noutua (very good one), the chipset temp hovers around 50'ish tops. I could strap an 80mm fan on it.

If you have arctic silver around, reseat the chipset heatsink & apply some of it. I think the problem is the heatpipe that adds all the temps together. Right now, the 680i rig I fixed has 2 separate heatsinks.

The only caveat with 680i is that the memory controller can be fried due to higher than usuall vdimm. Use a tad lower voltage than the ram's specs. i.e. ram needs 2.0v, give it 1.9v max.

http://www.evga.com/forums/tm.asp? [...] page=1&key

Yes definitly replace the stock thermal paste. It's usually gooped up in there and I'm surprised it does anything. Just put a dot of arctic silver 5 or if you're worried about an electrical short, use arctic silver ceramique...