Purpose For Cooling Northbridge/Southbridge?

Reldar · 12 Nov 2010 at 20:31

Ok this may seem like a nooby question but I see people sometimes liquid cool the northbridge and southbridge on a motherboard.

Why is this? What benefit does it provide to have cooler bridges?
Does it help with overclocking and overall stability?

Cheers.

TheCenturion · 12 Nov 2010 at 20:32

Not a nooby question at all

When you overclock, they can get very hot, especially when increasing voltage.

BigRazer93 · 12 Nov 2010 at 20:37

TheCenturion said:
Not a nooby question at all
When you overclock, they can get very hot, especially when increasing voltage.

+1... And the hotter they get, the more chance of your OC becoming unstable.

1Day · 12 Nov 2010 at 22:31

The north-bridge on 775 systems was the limiting factor for FSB in many cases. So the more headroom you can bring about by having a cooler NB the better (read higher) your overclock would be. This limitation was brought home when the P45 chipset and the Rampage Extreme X48 motherboard hit the scene. Suddenly many CPU's that were tapped out at 500 odd FSB were hitting the magic 600 on those board. Ah those were good old days

EniGmA1981 · 13 Nov 2010 at 08:39

Might have to invest in a nb/sb cooling solution and see if I can hit 4.5G

lol

Might at least get my ram up to 1200 lol

reilly · 13 Nov 2010 at 12:22

I was hitting 70C on my southbridge when I had a Striker Extreme 775 board and a E8400 at 4.5ghz . A small fan attached helped abit by about 4c.

Cookeh · 13 Nov 2010 at 13:38

reilly said:
I was hitting 70C on my southbridge when I had a Striker Extreme 775 board and a E8400 at 4.5ghz . A small fan attached helped abit by about 4c.

Yh but SB doesn't matter nearly as much as NB

EniGmA1981 · 13 Nov 2010 at 14:27

Someone wanna spec me a good NB cooler? Cheap as possible, but still effective

that's what I like lol

OLDPHART · 13 Nov 2010 at 15:03

Just add a fan, size depending on the size of your NB, my NB gets quite hot being a EX58-UD5, added a fan the hotest it gets now is 53'c instead of 57'c. :cool:

mmj_uk · 13 Nov 2010 at 15:39

Most of the important stuff has been moved onto the CPU with recent sockets so the temperature is not really important, the X58 for example is little more than a PCI-E hub, I think it's the same with 890FX etc.

Avathar77 · 13 Nov 2010 at 19:44

EniGmA1981 said:
Someone wanna spec me a good NB cooler? Cheap as possible, but still effective that's what I like lol

I was looking to cool the NB of my current motherboard and from what I can find it was the "EK NB/SB 5".

jaffveyda · 13 Nov 2010 at 20:54

You ca always but a Wc motherboard fullcover.

bifday2k · 14 Nov 2010 at 11:26

Avathar77 said:
I was looking to cool the NB of my current motherboard and from what I can find it was the "EK NB/SB 5".

You should'nt need to add extra cooling to the north bridge on a P35 mobo, my old msi one only ever touched 40c when i was pushing passed 500fsb, with increased nb volts.

As long as its got a good heatsink on it, or heatpipe system and there is good airflow in the case P35 mobo's run cool.

Biffa · 15 Nov 2010 at 09:48

The other reasons are that if you are water cooling the CPU and GPU's for quieter running (which is what a lot of watercoolers go for), then you often will have less airflow in the case over the motherboard components, so if you are overclocking as well then you may have insufficient cooling as many motherboards now days rely on the air from the CPU fans to cool things like mosfets etc.

So it depends on the board, ones with hot running N200 chipsets are the ones you often see being watercooled.