Suggestions for Northbridge & Southbridge Cooler

[ffjason]

Hi. This is one of my first posts but I hope you guys can help by giving me some advice.

I have the EVGA nforce 680i sli motherboard pictured here:

As you may be aware the southbridge on this motherboard runs rather hot without the fan installed on the northbridge. I get temps in excess of 60C reported in Everest. The northbridge is also very hot to touch. The problem is that the fan is really noisy when it is installed and the rest of my system is pretty much silent.

So I was wondering if you could advise on a replacement cooler for the northbridge and southbridge (which are joined by a heatpipe which also gets very hot). Unfortunately I've not much space left in the case as my 8800 GTX covers the southbridge and the Thermaltake BigTyp 120 (http://www.thermaltake.com/product/C...l-p0114-01.asp) overhangs the northbridge a bit.

I know EVGA do a fan accessory for the southbridge (http://www.evga.com/products/moreinf...pecs&family=99) I can imagine that it will be noisy running at 4800rpm (even though they claim less than 20dB) and I can't imagine it would do much for the temperatures considering how little heatsink is actually there to remove the heat from the chip.

Anyway have you any ideas?

Cheers,
Jason

[BenchZowner]

For the southbridge you will be kinda forced to hit a ThermalRight HR-05 SLI ( if you're using long graphics cards ).
For the NorthBridge you can use the ThermalRight HR-05 or the Swiftech MCX159-Cu ( if you can find one )
Even with those on, the NorthBridge should be hot in the summer, so a 80mm/120mm silent fan above the NB would be your best choice ( unless you're willing to go watercooling, but watercooling the NB & SB for regular/24/7 use isn't really worth it, unless you want a deadly silent system )

[Jsunn]

I was definitly not impressed with how the thermalright mounted on the MoBo. I would suggest, if you don't have clearance issues with the CPU heatsink, to go with something with a better mounting mechanism.

Let me know if you have any questions.

-J

[Jsunn]

Here is the review and thread when I installed the NB and SB cooler.

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...d.php?t=185535


-J

[mad_skills]

I agree on the TR HR-05 suggestion, it's a heck of a NB heatsink.