Live MB OC Report :: ASUS Rampage Extreme

[eternal_fantasy]

Quick quetion - How important is it to cool the chips on the far side of the NB Power regs? i.e the ones that would be underneath the two ramsinks furthest away from the NB? Im using some thermal tape on the ramsinks which is working fine on all the others, but because of lack of surface area, those two keep falling off - I have an 80mm fan blowing over that area atm to be on the safe side.

How have u guys got your ramsinks on there? Used adhesive? I wasnt sure on such small chips that they would survive when u removed the ramsinks again when using adhesive.

It is not because there isn't enough surface area over the NB MOSFETs. If you look carefully there are 2 small resistors that are slightly higher on the motherboard then the FETs preventing proper contact of the ramsink with it.


I had to use a plyer to slowly dig away underneath the ramsink to create a gap for the resistor. Becareful though that you actually make the gap high enough to avoid the resistor or you may bridge it when you stick on the ramsinks.

Weather you need to cool the northbridge's VRM is debatable, as the components there are quite capable of functioning at high temperatures. It doesn't run as hot as the FETs for the CPU, but hotter then those for the RAM. It tends to hover at around 60 degrees for the NB VRM, and the RAM FETs around 40 degrees. My theory is that because as FETs gets hot, it's internal resistance increases, so you will need to set higher values in the BIOS to acheve the same end voltage. It might be total nonsense, but never a bad idea to cool a hot component. You can see on many higher end DFI boards they have small heatsinks for the MOSFET of the RAM and northbridge.


Here is what I did on my Maximus Extreme NB MOSFET some time ago and trust me, the ram sink gets HOT!!:


I use a infared surface temperature thermometer to measure temps on the motherboard and see how hot each component gets:


And finally here is my current setup for NB VRM cooling:


The chokers and ML cap I left as is cos I don't feel they run as hot as the MOSFETs, and looks a lot nicer/tidier then burying the whole VRM area in ramsinks.

Have fun modding!