Northbridge chipset cooler questions

dirtydog · 30 Apr 2006 at 10:24

I have an Abit BH7 board which suffers from the same design fault as the Abit IC7 in that the northbridge heatsink is prone to falling off, as mine did yesterday - it landed on the graphics card but thankfully no harm seems to have been done

I have a couple of questions, firstly how safe is it for me to run the PC without a northbridge heatsink at all, until I get it fixed? It seems quite happy at the moment.

Secondly, I am intending to glue the heatsink back on rather than clip it (partly because one of the clips has fallen off the motherboard, never to be found again

) so will double-sided thermal adhesive TAPE be sufficient, or will only adhesive paste have sufficient strength? The tape seems a good deal cheaper so that's why I'm wondering.

Thanks in advance

Edeath · 30 Apr 2006 at 17:43

clips plus thermal tape should do the job. however it is reallnt not a good idea to run the board without the nb heatsink on. My friend had an nf7-s and the fan failed. Eventually his memory channels died one by one and then his agp died as he never changed it. Thermal adhesive would be ** best bet as this will trandfer the heat well and be rock solid.

Ed

dirtydog · 1 May 2006 at 06:54

Yeah I can't use clips so I was wondering if the tape would be sufficient on its own

Does anyone know how strong it is and how much weight it can hold?

Minstadave · 1 May 2006 at 10:21

dirtydog said:
Yeah I can't use clips so I was wondering if the tape would be sufficient on its own

Does anyone know how strong it is and how much weight it can hold?

All the tape I've seen isn't really that strong, I wouldn't use tape unless the chipset is quite large like a geforce 3/4 gpu style and not like the tiny NF4 chipset.

A cheap and effective alternative is to just put a small blob of superglue on the corners of the heatsink, thermal paste in the middle and hold it onto the chipset until its firmely stuck. That works very effectively, and to get it off all you do is run the system for a while to warm up the sink and twist it off.

dirtydog · 1 May 2006 at 10:27

So Superglue won't damage the chip? It doesn't have a heatspreader on it, it's just the bare chip, it looks exactly like an old style Pentium 3 with the small raised bit in the middle

I'm not sure if the superglue wouldn't damage/melt the surface of the chip?

Found an image... http://www.tomshardware.hu/cpu/01q3/010702/images/northbridge.jpg

ted34 · 1 May 2006 at 11:33

Your best of using a zalman passive cooler and if you dont want to use the clips use thermal adhesive

dirtydog · 1 May 2006 at 11:36

The original cooler is passive so I'll be reusing it - it isn't like the IC7 which has a fan. It only weighs about 25-30g so I wondered if thermal tape might be sufficiently strong. Considering the tape is like £1 and the paste is nearer £10.

Has anyone tried tape or superglue in this situation please as I'd like to know what your experience was

dirtydog · 1 May 2006 at 11:41

Also am I doing harm by running without a heatsink at the moment? I have downclocked my machine from 200fsb and DDR200 to 100fsb and DDR100 to try and keep it as cool as possible.