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

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?

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

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.