Anyone who owns a Gigabyte GA-k8nf-9

[automaton20]

Hey anyone out there buy one of these boards??? I recieved one without a NorthBridge Fan instead it looks like it has passive cooling , Whenever I try to play a game the northBridge heats up like crazy and the comp shuts down.... ANyone have afan on theirs????

 

[gsparesa]

I've got a gold fan on mine.
Did yours come with some type of heatsink?

 

[Trente]

Originally posted by: gsparesa
I've got a gold fan on mine.

 

[jterrell]

Gold fan.
Not sure I've heard of any other way its shipped.

Add a fan bro. Make sure its small(low profile) as the pci-express card sits atop it.

 

[automaton20]

Yes my mother board came with a gold heatsink (no fan) on it which i am pretty sure is not doing the job because it gets really hot almost to hot to touch... i think i am going to return it to newegg... because i am also having troube with the dimm slots as well...I think i have a defective board

 

[dan aka jack]

Hey!

I have a GA-K8NF-9 and it doesn't have a fan on the nforce chip. In fact, this is my 2nd GA-K8NF-9 in as many days. The first was totally dead on arival (but had a fan on the nforce chip). My new board doesn't have a fan on the nforce chip and it gets DAMN hot (too hot to touch). And, after only 10 minutes of use, my graphics card died! A brand new Asus X300 PCI-E graphics card! Some people suggest the power regulators may be dead on the mobo. It's confusing me a lot.

Where did you get your mobo from? Is it possible it's a grey import? What's your serial number? Have you contacted Gigabyte to ask them if your serial number is legit. Some people have suggested that the lack of active cooling of the nforce chip marks the board as being "pre-production"!

Here are some threads to get your teeth into:

http://www.rhcf.com/sis-bin/ultimatebb.cgi/topic/41/53.html?#000009

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?s=&postid=4208015

You're the only other guy I've found with passive cooling on their nforce4-4x chip. Please stay in touch. We might be able to figure out what the hell is going on if we support eachother.

Thanks a lot,
Jack

 

[dan aka jack]

Urg... I still haven't heard back from Gigabyte about the serial numbers. Does anyone have a phone number or email address for Gigabyte? Or, even better, does anyone have a list of the "grey import" serial numbers from Gigabyte? I've tried contacting them using their web form but I haven't heard anything from them.

 

[z3r0x2]

I just got my GA-K8NF-9 and it has passive cooling as well, havent built the computer yet thought (doing it on Sunday).

Photo here http://www.freewebs.com/z3r0_x2/northbridge.jpg

 

[hafa]

What retailer did you get your board from, z3r0x2?

 

[z3r0x2]

Paradigm Pc's(www.pp.co.nz), I live in New Zealand, and its a local company with a good reputation.

 

[SunSamurai]

Blarg.

 

[dan aka jack]

Hi z3r0x2,

Yeah, your passive cooler looks exactly like mine. I'll be very interested to hear how well your board performs. I wonder: please could you post your serial number? I still haven't heard back from Gigabyte about my serial number and it would be cool if we could figure figure out which SNs correspond to these "passive cooling" boards.

Thanks,
Jack

 

[dan aka jack]

OK - I've plugged a PCI graphics card into my potentially duff mobo. It works so far... I'll leave it running and see if the mobo fries this graphics card as well! If it does that I know for sure that either my mobo or the PSU are screwed.

Jack

 

[ChineseDemocracyGNR]

All the new "Value" nForce4 boards from Gigabyte use passive cooling (even the SLI), so it's very likely that they're using this new cooler on the GA-K8NF-9. They probably didn't use it before because it wasn't ready yet (remember this board was very early to the market).

 

[smiorgan]

I'm commissioning a new system from a local shop with this board. Was very surprised to hear that the board in the shop had passive cooling, cos I'd already seen it with the active one. But the guys assured me it was passively cooled.

 

[dan aka jack]

WTF?!?!...

...So, I was installing XP again (with my PCI graphics card installed on my potentially dodgy GA-K8NF-9 mobo)... all was going well... the disk got formatted, files were copied... then, just when Setup was about to launch Windows the screen flickered and it went back to the "Welcome to Setup: This portion of the Setup program prepares Microsoft Windows XP to run on your computer. To set up Windows XP now, press ENTER..."

 

[z3r0x2]

hey dan aka jack,

I got my system built today, and everything is working smoothly, windows installed fine. I can't give you the serial number right now as my new system is currently round at my brothers (he's transfering some stuff onto it for me), but when I get it back tomorrow I'l let you know

 

[dan aka jack]

Thanks loads for your reply, z3r0x2...

...I've got XP installed too... and I left it burning in over night and it's been rock solid (still using the PCI graphics card). I'm about to install the PCI-E graphics card and see what happens!

Thanks a lot,
Jack

 

[dan aka jack]

OK... it looks like I might owe Gigabyte an appology:

My motherboard is installed and working with a PCI-Express graphics card. It looks like my problem was a bust Asus graphics card, not a bust mobo.

Jack.

 

[dan aka jack]

And here's another board with passive cooling:

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?...tem&item=6740208244&fromMakeTrack=true

Looks like all the newer GA-K8NF-9s have passive cooling.

 

[hafa]

For some odd reason, I'm just not comfortable with a NB that's too hot to touch. Take a look at my ghetto solution to get some air over the Passive NB HS.

This also solves the problem of what to do with all of the stock AMD HS fans I have lying around. Now if only I could find something creative to do with the aluminium part...

 

[thunderroller]

cooling is very important

 

[tallman45]

Mine has a large passive gold heatsink, quite a wide one, much bigger than any other passive heatsink I have seen