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

[Brother Esau]

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

[nanohead]

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

[the pharaoh]

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.