Which NB HS

[User1001]

Hi everyone,
I can't stand all the noise in my comp so I'm going to silence everything. Anyone know what's the best performance and silent North Bridge HS for the GA-8XNXP?

Thanks

 

[jarsoffart]

There aren't too many NB heatsinks out there. Most just use the golden Zalman one. I use it and I find it perfectly suitable. I haven't seen anyone post that their NB is overheating while using the Zalman one. Probably because most use it in their quest for silence, not really for overclocking. At Sidewindercomputers.com, they have a Microcool heatsink/fan that looks like it would work pretty well even without the fan. I think you would only need the fan if you were crazy hardcore extreme overclocking or really paranoid. It's copper and has many thin fins. It also costs 35 dollars though. If you want that type of performance I think you could just get a $10 Thermalright SK-6 from SVC.com or even a GC68 and take off the fan. Get some thermal adhesive (Arctic Silver 3 Adhesive or Arctic Alumina, or just a really thin layer of super glue) and you'll definitely have a large enough heatsink to run the NB passively. If you don't have enough clearance on your motherboard, just cut up the heatsink. You might as well just look in an old Pentium computer and use that CPU heatsink.

 

[pspada]

I'm using the Vantec Iceberq CCB-A1C on my northbridge, and it dropped it's temp by ~10c under load over the stock hs. It looks cool, too - but it only has 2 wires, so it does not report the fan speed to the system. Still, a nice solution, since I then moved the stock nb hs to the southbridge, though I needed to shave some of the fins a bit to provide clearence for some components on the mobo. Virtually silent at 4500rpm.

 

[render]

I'm using a COOLMASTER CH5-5K12 Socket 7/370 Cooler(Heatpipe HSF) for NB and it perfectly fits on my 8RDA+. no adhesive. Yes, I'm using screws.

pic1
pic2

You can buy it from me. LMK.

 

[User1001]

will the zalman HS work well? The ZM-NB32J

 

[Chumpman]

damn that one from Sidewindercomputers.com looks hardcore

 

[render]

Originally posted by: Chumpman
damn that one from Sidewindercomputers.com looks hardcore

You are talking about northpoleright?...but $34.95, no way. a little bit of creativity saves a lot of money.

 

[Insane3D]

I went with the large, but passive HS route and slapped a swifty clone on my NF7-S.

Pre Mod

NB Heatsink waiting to be applied

Completed Project

Close Up (NB)

Close Up (SB)



I almost forgot the best part...it's only $5! :Q

 

[TenaciousT]

Insane,

Two questions:

1) What is the purpose of cooling the southbridge? I've never seen that before (note: I'm a newb).

2) What are you using to hold those on?

 

[Insane3D]

1. Well, on most any other chipset, southbridge cooling is not needed at all. However, on the nForce2 chipset, it runs very hot. The MCP-T southbridge on the higher end NF2 boards has a integrated APU and Firewire, and tends to run a good deal hotter than SB's on most other chipsets. On the NF2 boards I have used, the SB is almost too hot to touch when running 200mhz FSB+.

2. The NB and SB heatsinks I used in this project are both attached with Artic Silver thermal adhesive. The NB HS used is actually a CPU HS unit, and using the holes in the board around the NB would have required drilling and modification. The SB on the Abit NF7-S has no holes around it, so the only way to attach is with an adhesive. On my 8RDA+, it had the holes around the SB too, so I used the regular push pins for that application.

 

[Holmecollie]

Is it really safe to have a cpu hs like that attached with epoxy... I would be scared that my NB would be ripped out going to a LAN or something

 

[render]

Originally posted by: Holmecollie
Is it really safe to have a cpu hs like that attached with epoxy... I would be scared that my NB would be ripped out going to a LAN or something

Yeah, That's the reason why I used screws for NB HS.