Cooling Asus A8N Premium Northbridge

adam3223 · 20 May 2006 at 17:36

I've noitced my system become unstable over the past few days, and i believe its due to the passively cooled northbridge on my mobo.

Its very hot when i touch it, but i have no way of measuring exactly how hot.

There isn't much airflow over the chip itself, and the heatpipe heatsink is near my sythe ninjas 120mm fan, but doesn't seem to be cooled well either.

I was wondering if the northbridge is designed to run v hot?
or any suggestions on how to cool it?

adam3223 · 20 May 2006 at 17:54

At the bottom?
Do you mean at the back, just below the PSU?

adam3223 · 21 May 2006 at 00:10

The thing is, if the current heatpipe design isn't cooling effectively, will another passive solution solve it?

I did look at the Zalman, and it looked like its brackets could fit in the plastic 'screws' holding the asus cooler, isn't that possible?

adam3223 · 22 May 2006 at 15:52

Im using a stacker, and i haven't switched to btx mode.

Regarding the mosfets, i intend to leave the original heatsink on, and just put the zalman ontop of the asus cooler ontop of the northbridge.

If you meant cooling the mosfets, surely the heatsink adjacent to them actually hinders that, by realsing more heat close to them?

At the moment i have taken a 40mm fan off a SCSI drive enclosure, and hung it over the northbridge using one of the spare ram clips as an anchor. This has got rid off all my BSOD so im sure the northbrdige is the cause of the problem. However this is a very noisey and dodgey solution so im still considering the Zalman.