Water Cooling ASUS Rampage Formula

The south bridge is the coolest running piece in the setup. You can buy replacement passive cooling heatsinks for your southbridge. For the rest of the setup, cooling with water isnt a bad idea, but watercooling the northbridge is over kill unless you are doing a crazy over clock. Asus' stock heat sinks are probably more than adequate to handle keeping everything cool with a decent over clock. A better solution may be to get a fan for the northbridge like an Antec Spotcool (iirc) if your really worried about heat.

What kind of a loop are you going to setup and what order?

Cost or headaches? His concept of financially acceptable and yours might be vastly different. That being said, giving advice to someone who has the means to buy what he wants isn't yours to give.

Headaches? It isn't rocket science and if you don't understand that you should make sure you read directions, seal connections and test components, then yes, you deserve to air cool instead.

Silence? Watercooling and silence aren't always a 1:1 ratio. Those that are silent depend highly on large area radiators and low speed fans. High performance depend on high-flow fans which generate as much noise as most case fans. Where you don't get noise is CPU fan, and GPU fan. The idea that watercooling is silent comes from lesser kits that don't perform as well. And to be honest, even a moderate to high performance setup isn't all that loud...it has to do with fan choice. If you can hear a pump...something is seriously wrong.

As for the heatpipe NB/SB coolers, its an all or nothing approach. You can't separate the stock coolers from the heatpipes and expect them to work. You can look for NB waterblocks (doubt the SB needs one) or get a heatsink/fan for NB and passive heatsink for the SB. If you want to OC...a NB block is a good investment.

Speaking as someone who owns an ASUS Rampage Formula, I'd say that watercooling the CPU is fine. The southbridge really doesn't need it, but if you want to, go ahead. The northbridge does run hot and if overclocking very high, it either needs an auxiliary fan or water cooling. There is a heatpipe connecting the bridges. Personally, if I did install watercooling, I'd watercool the CPU and just run an extra fan to the northbridge. Or you could do as Grieve suggested and watercool the CPU and northbridge, but leave the southbridge alone.

Anandtech has a couple articles on the Rampage Formula, so you might look them over.

1. Grow up and/or calm down

2. Cost to beat air is a minimum of 2x the cost and in return with a modern Intel CPU you might get a 10% better OC. It may look cool and it should be quieter but that isn't much. I would discourage it no matter what his disposable income was unless he was aiming for near silence.

3. Headaches, where to begin... Possible leaks, pain to make changes to the system. Leak testing the loop 24 hours if you got it right the first time. I didn't consider the researching, locating, and initial installation a headache.

4. I didn't say all water cooling was silent. I was implying that I would only recommend it for silence. You could also deduce that I didn't believe that oc was a good reason to do it. I personally hit a voltage barrier that I will not cross for my OC it's the exact same with or without water cooling. Even when I pushed the system in the first month my switch to water only gave me about a 100MHz bump. I have a hand selected money no object loop. Needless to say it performs pretty well in case you're wondering.

5. As for the cooling of the north and south bridges I think Sailer stated it best.

6. Lastly I wish more people would have discouraged me. I was warned and knew what I was getting into but didn't put much consideration in the negative aspect of it. So we'll have disagree about giving advice and opinions about any topic. That's what forums are for and if a few one liners stirs up some discussion that's even better.

The southbridge never needs to be cooled, not for any reason really. It is pretty much the nerve center for your raid functions. If you can fit ANY heatsink on it then that is good enough.

The northbridge, however, definitely does have it's cases where it is better to err on the side of caution and include it in a cooling loop - although, I do not recommend doing it that often.

The Northbridge, typically, controls memory functions like %u2013 a memory controller (for Intel Chipsets), a level 2 cache communicator and bridges the gap between the CPU and Ram %u2013 it also handles functions between the CPU and the graphics processor on the PCI, AGP and PCIe slots. Since this particular part is always busy it can generate quite a lot of heat. Now, the only case I would ever recommend adding it to a watercooling loop is if the person in question was aggressively o'clocking - I mean, the CPU, Ram, voltage tweaking - you get the picture. Otherwise, a decent HSF combo would suffice.

That's all fine but how does one attach a cooling fan to the NB? It's not exactly obvious. Can anyone help?

You can also find replacement northbridge and chipset coolers on many sites like Newegg and FrozenCPU.com. Many of these have alternative mounting mechanisms for a variety of motherboards.

Failing at failling is sweet success!
Lavacon. You're an idiot. You fail at explaining something simple. Go chew on a buffalo's anus.
I've zip tied fans plenty. Just not on a northbridge that won't allow it done from the top. The space to place it by the side is very tight and zip tied fans are rattle prone. You have useless photos up your ass but can't come up with something for this? Pathetic...

Whatever.

^LOL.

Excellent response; I expected nothing less from someone too lazy to do something themself. A pouty 'whatever' speaks volumes about the kind of person you are in response to the people who gave you as much information they could to answer your question from a thread you hijacked, no less.

I think the problem is that we all were contributing to your answer, but yet that wasn't good enough for you so you demanded pictures, diagrams, step by step instructions, etc. The point of my debate remains the same: if you don't want to put in the time and effort to figure it out for yourself, then maybe you should stick to leaving things stock and the side of your case bolted up. Outside of offering ideas, there isn't anything else any of us can do for you.

Always consult your unbiased, eternal friend, The Google for all other needs.

I am pretty sure that is exactly what you are asking. Besides that, you have done nothing in this forum except demand answers and reply to posts with ignorant arrogance and the personality of a rabid badger.

Again, I offer the question:

Yea keep up with your posts lavacon they're as worthless as yourself. As for starting a new thread that's what I would have done anyway. You're the one who came out "trying" to insult and that's why I fought back.

Sure this thread is dead.

Anyway I got the northbridge sorted, not with a zip tied 40mm fan but with a 120mm blowing across. Thanks for the nothing loser.

Sorry I'm just now getting back to my thread guys I've had to move and haven't had internet for a few days now. Thanks for the info but do you think I'm better off using a spot cooler or including the NB in the loop? I'm on air right now and can hit 4.26 with a 533 fsb and x8 multi but its not stable. I'd like to take that a little bit further but I'd be happy with it at 4.26, is that extreme overclocking in your book?

3.0Ghz stock, most can get a 3.6 OC without volt mods

I just put my PC together a couple days ago.

Specs are:
Thermaltake Armor + w/ built in liquid cooling
Rampage Forumla MB
Q9550 2.83Ghz Processor
8GB (4x2GB) Corsair Dominator DD2 (1066) Memory
(1) WD Velociraptor
(2) Seagate 1TB drives
Sapphire ATI 4870 X2

Currently the CPU runs at a decent 28c at idle and about 36c at load
The NB and SB idle at 50c all the time. I really dont have a place to put my PC where it has access to cool air all the time. So it's going to run hot. And with the HD4870 X2 card in it, the box gets really hot.

The case has 2 140mm fans (1 front and 1 back) and it has a 230mm fan in the case side window blowing onto the board. If I add the cheesy little NB cooler that comes with MB, the NB temps drop 1c.

I'm considering water cooling for the NB as well (seems SB is hot by osmosis), just need to find blocks that work without issue.

second thought if your are think about the swiftech ultra kit try and find the ultra+ kit from them it comes with a nb and gpu blocks and the price increase is fair 280$ canadian

was reading the thread and this might be to late but all i did was remove the entire heatsink, wiggled the copper pipe and slowly but surely that neat little SB heatsink with ROG tag on it came off, severed the ombilical cord to the NB!!! Have a swiftech GTZ and a chipset water block and run 3.8ghz stable on my q6600!!!!

I got a question regarding the Asus rampage formula. I do want to watercool the NB (its way too hot in spain to even OC to 3 GHZ with a BIG fan blowing air all over the heatsink; i used a thermaltake dual PCI Slot fan that moves like 26 CFM and blows directly on the heatsink)
Now my problem is not to remove the Heatsink, nor do leak testing etc, Its how can u really remove that heatsink ? You leave Heatpipe there?
I mean, heatpipe is "inside" the Wave form heatsink, and right over the NB Chip...
I feel its gonna be tricky to get it done. And if it its possible, can u keep the heatsink to use the NB Waterblock to actually cool the WHOLE Stuff?

i think that heatsink was cut and polished..

Don't even know if this guy is still knocking around but i'll add my piece anyway. I have recently invested in a watercooling system from watercoolinguk.co.uk. Now, yes it was expensive and I had to buy all the parts seperatly and build the thing. It took time and money, however, I now have a q6600 @ 3.6ghz from 2.4. Thats near asw damn it a 50% increase which kinda proves you wrong, sorry but there it is)) I have an Asus rampage Extreme and have the Northbridge in the loop, as far as I can see it also takes care of the Southbridge. So, to our friend wanting some advice, maybe from someone that has actually ( succesfully built the whole system ) Yes it is well worth it. Apart from phase cooling nothing beats water cooling for consistant cooling and noise, what noise?? And finally, the look, as far as I'm concerned, nothing beats the look of a properly set up watercooling system with UV parts ( lights and water ) if you have the cash go for it. If you want pictures email me at supa-ted@live.co.uk

Thanks for thw welcone. I don't at any point remember quoting or stating that my system is ( special ) I mearly stated that this guy who jumped in telling people not to watercool was wrong about the noise and that you can get a much higher overclock than he was suggesting. I appreciate that my chip isn't ( new ) but im damn sure it's one of the best overclocking chips for the cash!!!! Anyway even with an i7920 can go to 4ghz ( on air ) so if what your suggesting is that i was trying to say that my processor was new or ( amazing ) im not.


BTW kinda pointless welcoming somebody and then having a digg.