View Full Version : any benifit to cooling voltage regulators?
warbux
11-19-2007, 12:11 PM
Im building a 3rd block in my pc for my flex ram, and decided I should put the N/B S/B in it too. Now I know cooling the S/B is kinda useless but I got the block for 25 bucks, and I knew by cooling the NB I would have to do something with the SB because they were attached.
So with that in mind, were back to cooling the voltage regulators. Obviously its not important to cool, because I couldnt find any articles on it, and its for that same reason I don't know what advantage if any I get from cooling it.
Freeboy63
11-19-2007, 12:17 PM
u are goingto get some varied answers for sure.. I have an Asus and they seem to get hot undeer oc conditions especial if you are not using air for the cpu, I am using a direct air cooling to the chips, 80mm Zalmons, on the 12v setting and my chips went from HOT to cool! Does it help? It certainly cannot hurt.
warbux
11-19-2007, 12:52 PM
u are goingto get some varied answers for sure.. I have an Asus and they seem to get hot undeer oc conditions especial if you are not using air for the cpu, I am using a direct air cooling to the chips, 80mm Zalmons, on the 12v setting and my chips went from HOT to cool! Does it help? It certainly cannot hurt.
yea, I am thinking the least it will do is keep the internals of the case cool.
It can keep them from burning themselves out in some cases, especially if you've got no CPU fan to blow air on them.
My MSI P35 Platinum board has three uncooled VRMs north of the CPU socket. Sure enough, after leaving the system for a 24 hr dual-Orthos burn (Q6600, 3.6 GHz, 1.425 Vcore) I came back to find that one of them them had burnt itself out.
That said, sticking on a couple of Swiftech ramsinks and running my two case fans at 1200 rpm instead of 1000 fixed the problem. Watercooling them is probably excessive under almost all circumstances.
gearhead
11-19-2007, 09:23 PM
From what i understood from my days watercooling dual xeons on the pc-dl is that you get more stable vcore and less droop from getting good cooling on them. The board not frying itself is a side-benefit. I built my own vrm waterblocks from copper tubing and elbows.
Freeboy63
11-21-2007, 04:32 AM
right, simply case cooling imo is not enough for some HOT mobos. like mine. My Asus P5k-e really gets hot, I have mine on a side mount, with the Zalmons, pushing something like 85 cfm direcly on the hotspots.