Anyone have evidence of improved overclock with NB watercooling?

Jimbo Mahoney · 17 Jan 2008 at 12:46

Cynical me again...

Does anyone have numerical evidence of the benefits (or not) of cooling the northbridge? By numerical, I mean Mhz gains, not temperature drops.

I'm skeptical that it helps with anything other than peace of mind.

I used to watercool the NB on my DFI NF4, but didn't conduct any tests and since it was WC from the day I installed it, had no comparison with it being aircooled.

Bubo · 17 Jan 2008 at 13:49

Can I aslo ask whether this is actually possible in the first place on motherboards nowadays which seemingly lock the NB sink in place with heatpipes all over the place? Coming from a NF4 background my self I look at these newer boards with gigantic sinks covering the nb and wonder how easy these things are to take off, especially which a dirty great heatpipe going through the middle of it.

Jimbo Mahoney · 17 Jan 2008 at 14:30

From what I have seen, they are pretty easy to take off (I don't have one yet though).

The sinks just screw onto or are glued onto the chips like normal. The heatpipes are clamped in the middle of the sinks like a sandwich, so it's all dismantleable (if that's a word!). I suspect if you decide to take the NB sink off, for example, you can just take the heatpipe that it's connected to out too.

Bubo · 17 Jan 2008 at 19:10

The ones I've seen though, admittedly just from screenshots, have a single heatpipe which threads its way from the SB, through the NB and on to the mosfets. That suggests to me that if you too the NB sink off you would either have to seriously bend the heat pipe out the way, or take the heat pipe out altogether, or take all the sinks off. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

pastymuncher · 17 Jan 2008 at 19:22

Jimbo Mahoney said:
From what I have seen, they are pretty easy to take off (I don't have one yet though).

The sinks just screw onto or are glued onto the chips like normal. The heatpipes are clamped in the middle of the sinks like a sandwich, so it's all dismantleable (if that's a word!). I suspect if you decide to take the NB sink off, for example, you can just take the heatpipe that it's connected to out too.

The P5E's heatsink contraption is by no means easy to remove. Asus uses some sort of epoxy stuff to glue it on now. The SB was a joke. It was'nt even touching. The NB on the other hand was a nightmare. It took a lot of careful heating with a hairdryer to loosen it enough to pull it off. Even then some of the epoxy stuff was left on the northbridge IHS. It was like plasticky stuff. Took ages gently removing it with a Stanley knife blade. I now have a lapped Zalman NB cooler on the SB and a XSPC X20 block on the NB. Have'nt a clue if it's given me any extra overclock because i removed the heatpipes straight away. It has given me excellent temps though, which is why i did it in the first place as these X38's can get very warm. Come to that, so did my old Gigabyte 965P DS3P.

The heatpipe is in two parts on my board. From the SB up to the NB and then on top of the one cooling the mosfets. The other is just on the mosfets around the cpu socket. I left this one on. None of it is copper by the way. It's all copper coloured aluminium.

Rroff · 17 Jan 2008 at 19:23

I have no hard evidence... but pretty much all the 680i and 650i boards don't overclock much beyond 370-380MHz without additional cooling on the NB...

The Gigabyte 650i-DS4L I've been playing with wouldn't go much above 375 and no way hit 400 stable on the stock cooling but when I whacked a high throughput 60mm fan on the NB heatsink I got it upto 470MHz no hassle and it would probably go beyond that with extra voltage and better RAM - the RAM I'm using doesn't like going above 940-950MHz.

Jimbo Mahoney · 17 Jan 2008 at 20:51

Rroff said:
I have no hard evidence... but pretty much all the 680i and 650i boards don't overclock much beyond 370-380MHz without additional cooling on the NB...

The Gigabyte 650i-DS4L I've been playing with wouldn't go much above 375 and no way hit 400 stable on the stock cooling but when I whacked a high throughput 60mm fan on the NB heatsink I got it upto 470MHz no hassle and it would probably go beyond that with extra voltage and better RAM - the RAM I'm using doesn't like going above 940-950MHz.

Interesting, thanks!