Is good cooling on 790FX/SB750 chipset parts even neccessary?

I know lots of people buy aftermarket NB/SB cooling.... maybe I am missing something but does it even matter for AMD systems? The rationale being your IMC(NB) is directly on the CPU die itself. Its not like on 775 Intel, where the IMC sits on the Northbridge and can benefit from better cooling. With a BE processor, you dont need to go nuts on FSB at all. So how would good cooling on the 790FX/SB750 chipsets help things at all if you are not increasing bus speeds by much with a BE chip?

Am I wrong here? Thanks!

From what I've seen on my setup, the PWM (and thus the chipset, as they are connected to the same heatpipe cooler) gets hotter and hotter the more voltage you add to the CPU. I definitely had to add a fan on my PWM area on the board in sig to keep it cool in order to break ~3.6GHz clock limit I was hitting.

I used to run mine with the small passive sinks. The NB got hot (50-60*C) but did not affect my OC potential at all. The Spirit II I got on the NB shaved a good 30*C yet did not allow me to OC further. It runs cooler and that's about it in my case. I got a second Spirit II on the SB, but that's overkill I think and unnecessary; I may replace the passive sink on it just because the Spirit takes too muck damn space and the SB area is crowded as it is. For the PWM I just left the stock passive sink but I have a fan blowing on top.

yeah i understand the importance of PWM cooling, but don't see the benefit when it comes to AMD chipsets. Not unless you are trying to go for max integrated graphics runs for benching.... or trying to push bus speeds. Even on LN2 runs, i am not seeing any fancy chipset cooling in various pictures of setups.

If thats the case, I'm just going to forget about attaching chipset coolers to the 790FX/SB750 and do some spot cooling on the PWM areas when I make the switchover :D

I put a 250mm fan in the side panel.

yeah i put a much larger fun to cover up the heat.. :yepp:

I was covering my A79A-S with DICE several times during benching but it never helped a bit. Just adding a fan over PWM area was always enough for best results. Personally I did not see an advantage of cooling the board with more than a 120mm fan yet.

Enough for me to have to order a NB Water Block from Germany for D.F.I JR 790GX ...yes NB runs that hot! PWN ironically enough is much much cooler running:)

It doesn't make that much of a difference ultimately. Those parts that run the power subsystems are designed to run at high temperatures, as are most chips used in the high performance motherboards most of us buy. And the NB parts can take a severe beating heatwise. The SB parts could probably go without heatsinks at all, as they don't really do very much active work anymore (SATA, USB, etc). Most SB parts have tiny heatsinks on them anyway, and are only lukewarm to the touch

I had a water cooling loop on the NB (790FX), SB (SB750) and PWM section of the Asus M3A79-T, and the only thing it did was congest the inside of the case something awful with more hoses.... I ultimately pulled that loop out and just left the CPU and dual GPUs.

Overclocking results were identical both with and without water cooling. Its much easier to deal with the machine and service the inside and change parts without that loop. The only reason I put a water block on the PWM section originally was because of the heat it put out into my room, rather than for performance.

The only motherboard I ever went to the effort to put an "upgraded" NB sink on was the original Gigabyte 780G-S2H, where the NB shot up to 100C immediately when you booted the machine and then it was nearly burning to touch it, and the video would get corrupted sometimes. Gigabyte later reissued the board as a V 1.1 with a newer larger heatsink on the NB

I'm fairly sure the only reason it helped in my case is because my board was hitting temps as high as 65-70c during stress testing which IMHO is much too high. Re-mounted with AS5 and ceramique and added fans.