**Official ASUS Striker II Formula Discussion/Review/Overclock/Guide/BIOS Thread**

[Hor$eman]

I noticed something about the gold plated southbridge piece on the southbridge: it's just a cover for the heatpipes. I tried removing it so I can slap on a Thermalright hr-05 heatsink over the copper plate but ended up damaging one of the heatpipes. Now the board won't POST. I'm going to get a new one next week, lap the chipset cooler and try removing that gold cover on the southbridge again. If anyone has good suggestions on safely removing the southbridge covdmer, I'm all ears

That cover doesn't actually cover the SB. It covers some other smaller unit, which doesn't seem to get even warm to the touch. Removing this and adding a cooler to it is just lipstick. If you want to help yourself, I'd suggest adding something to the NB.

However, if you want to remove the whole assembly:

- Begin by removing the spring pinned "keepers" by pressing the back side of the keepers in with a pair of pliers and pulling on the other side of the pin at the same time, until all of the keepers are through. After two, it will be easy.
- Unscrew the North bridge.Lift the entire unit off. Only the center PCI-E plastic holder is in the way.

To remove an individual unit or plate, use acetone or nail polish remover and high heat (hair dryer style) to soften the glue. I think its like hot glue gun glue.

I took mine completely apart, but screwed the whole unit up in the process of trying to disassemble piece by piece, so ended up using thermalTake NB coolers on the NB and SB, and cut the heat pipes off the fet coolers and put them back on the way they were. max NB temp is now 59, SB temp is now 41 under 100% duo CPU load at 4.05 Ghz (duel instances of Prime95. The other smaller unit (as per above) has air fromthe SB cooler blown straight across it.