Northbridge Cooling When OC'ing. How Important Is It?

[desolator4u]

Sup ppl?
I'll be venturing into the OC'ing world once my CPU Cooler gets shipped all the way to Jamaica. I have the ASUS Striker Extreme (i'm not aware of the Northbridge even having a heatsink) and a Q6600 CPU. From all the reading i've done, I have come across a few articles that states it is a good idea to have a custom Fan over the Northbridge to of course keep it cool. How important is this? I'll be increasing the CPU's FSB to 425MHz and dropping the Multiplier to 8, so I can have 3.4GHz (1 GHz OC) and the DDR2 Memory will have to be OC'ed a bit from 400MHz to 425MHz to get the 1:1 Ratio.

So since the Northbridge handles important stuff like CPU, RAM and GPU, and the FSB will be increased and maybe some voltages as well, do I have to get a Fan over it? Is it necessary to setup a custom cooling system to keep the Northbridge temps low?

Thanks
~Des

 

[simon12]

Northbridge cooling is rarely needed but if it gets to hot (unlikely) then yes you need to cool it. You get NB blocks for water cooling kits so maybe extreme overclocks may need it.

 

[christop]

It's not a huge deal but I put a little fan on my north bridge for my overclock. Yes it does get hot when you overclock. If you don't believe me game on it for an hour while over clocked high then touch the nb heatsink.

 

[desolator4u]

I did read on the Corsair forums that someone with my MoBo Overvolted their RAM and it fried the Northbridge, trying to look for it again now too see what exactly were his settings. My prob is that this thing is suppose to last me a really long time. Money is tight, on top of the fact that it costs an insane amount of cash just to import computer parts to Jamaica. So ya, it's dated hardware but it cannot be replaced anytime soon.

~Des