Hope this one helps someone who really wants this 780i board. I went through a bit of pain but it worked out at the end.

Recently I've got Asus Striker II Formula and everything was looking well when I was assembling my new PC (well some old parts were used as well). Turned it on and it goes fine untill I started playing Crisys... 5 minutes into the game and computer just shut down on me, I could understand what went wrong, so started fiddling around with the bios and came across my North Bridge temps which were idling at about 80-82C while shoutdown trigger was set to 90C.

Scratched my head and googled the problem, seemed like lots of people had it and most advised to put a fan on top of NorthBridge to keep it "cooler", after putting fan on top of NB (first fan I used was a fan of the AMD cooler CM Freezer 64, I set it up the way it wasn't blowing directly onto the NB but rather sitting on top of the videocard and blowing upwards, airflow was parralel to the NB, I tried smaller fan blowing directly on to the NB but temps were the same but fan was a bit louder) and it helped, temperatures dropped but not considerably, they dropped to about 76-78 idle and were popping to 86-89 when playing Crysis or loading PC with some resorce hungry tasks. Not enough to trigger the shutdown but come on.... 86-89 is still hot.

Scratching my head again I went a step further as ASUS tech support said you can do anything with the heatpipes without voiding the warranty as long as you don't modify the board itself. Huge step it was (for me at least) to decide and go ahead with heatpipe polishing. But somehow I managed it and I also polished my CPU (Q6600) just as well while everything were out of the case anyway. So I used 600, 1000 and 1200 sandpaper first on both, Heatpipes and CPU and then used Autosol metal polishing paste to polish it to mirror finish, I aslo removed sticky grey stuff from MOSFET coolers to make a better contact and polished them a bit as well (not as good as chip coolers and cpu though).

Once evrything was polished I applied Arctic Alumina (ceramic) thermal compound to NB, SB, all MOSFETs and PCI-E2 chip, I then put heatpipes back and I also used small plastic washers on the back of the board to make heatpipes sit a bit tighter on the chips. I also decide to get rid of a big ugly Freezer 64 Fan from my NB and installed smaller fan from another AMD CPU cooler (3000rpm 9 balde) and with minor modifications screwed it on top of the NB, now it blows air directly onto the Northbridge. Put back my freshly polished CPU with its huge Gemini II cooler (factory polishing on this one is great), used some Arctic Silver 5 thermal compound and put it all back together.

Here are the photos of my work - http://www.vesta.co.nz/striker/ACDSe...ums/index.html

The problem was solved, it took a lot of work, but I am happy with the result at the end of the day. And even though it takes some time it is not as hard to do as it seems, you just have to be carefull with all the little things, use methylated spirits to clean things off and to wipe any residue from chips and wipe everything after polishing to make sure no metal bits left on any electronic components. Now my temperature on NB is 64C on Idle and never goes higher then 76C under full load. Note: I was doing a bit of overclocking and applied voltage to NB was 1.6V and it idled at 68C at this voltage and maxed out 71C (updated figures after some testing)

So here my temperatures running everything at stock:
Ambient room temperature - 24C
CPU Idle - 27C
CPU Load - 46C
NB Idle - 64C
NB Load - 68C

And here my temperatures on overclocked:
Ambient room temperature - 24C
CPU Idle (3.2Ghz, 1.45V) - 36C
CPU Load - 57C
NB Idle (1.6V applied)- 68C
NB Load - 71C

P.S. I then found MIPS waterblocks to cool this one HOT MoBo and ordered them from Aquatuning.de and now can't wait when they arrive to put a waterloop on my mobo. You can find all waterblocks for Asus Striker 2 here - http://www.aquatuning.de/, this you can find MOSFET block, NB & SB blocks.

I also noticed that NB runs much cooler with just one card, the difference was about 8-10C for my board without mods. I also had ThermalTake Toughpower 750W power supply but it wasn't handling it for my specs very well and was giving me lots of BSODs (USB BSOD, NV4_DISP BSOD, GENRAL HARDWARE FAILURE BSOD etc). I couldn't figure why I had all this problems for a while before I used Power Supply calculator from NewEgg, but thats a completely differeng saga alltogether. Now I've upgraded to Ultra X3 1000W and it does fine job.


A bit about OCing this beast: I can do fine up to 3Ghz, however I'm experiencing troble getting anywhere above 3 and being stable...

Anyway, it works fine at 3.0 as I said @ CPU - 1.425V. rest auto.

For 3.2 I tried following

FSB Quad frequencies with 9x multi (currently 1425) tried 1440, 1450, 1500, 1520, 1550, 1600 at no avail, interestig thing it doesn't want to boot at 15xx
Tried 8x multi @ 1800 (doesn't boot), 1600 with no luck getting to windows loading screen.
RAM unlinked and was anywhere from 760 to 818 at 5-5-5-15

CPU 1.42 - 1.55V (.025 steps), also auto
CPU PLL 1.50 - 1.60V, also auto
CPU VTT 1.30 - 1.60V, also auto
RAM 2.10 - 2.30V
NB 1.50 - 1.60, also auto
SB 1.50 - 1.65, also auto
1.2H - 1.20 - 1.30, also auto
Bridge Core 1.20 - 1.30, also auto
LLC enabled/disabled
All spectrums disabled
Virtualization enabled/disabled
LDT 3x, 4x, 5x
I didn't touch "System Clocks" section

Well it is pretty much what I played with.

I can load at 3.2 and work in windows for so long (run some 3DMark 06 and use all my other soft), but it BSODs now and then. At 3.2 the longest Prime was about 2 mins , few sessions of 3D Mark 06 I can do, Everest stress test didn't affect the PC at 3.2Ghz - 2.5 hours before I stopped it, I can work for a few hours without BSOD at 3.2 but its not good enough anyway.

3.2 workable but not stable

CPU 1.475
NB 1.6
Rest - auto


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Basically my wife was immature. I'd be at home in the bath and she'd come in and sink my boats.
- Woody Allen