DescentBB

I have a NF4 Ultra motherboard and the southbridge fan blows, like really really blows (as in sucks, not air but ass)

AAaaanyways, I was wondering if it was ok to run the southbridge chip with no fan or a heatsink with no fan?

Thank you.

It probably needs some sort of cooling, however if you pickup a reasonable passive northbridge heatsink for it you can probably get away with never having to deal with it again.

Jamie, remove the fan, and run the thing for a while with some load on it. Check to see how hot the heatsink is. If its too hot to touch for long, then it needs cooling.

One of the things I did for my northbridge was modify an old all-copper Volcano 7+ CPU cooler for use on a north bridge.



You can see I didn't get the holes aligned perfectly.... But it sits there nicely. I just cut the HS in half, drilled some holes in the base to clear a couple of caps, masked the base of the cooler so it wouldn't short anything (no masking where it meets northbridge core though!!), tapped the holes I drilled into the heatsink, and then screwed the thing onto the Mobo.

I'm sure you could do something similar to keep noise and heat down, without fans.

Mobius wrote:Jamie, remove the fan, and run the thing for a while with some load on it. Check to see how hot the heatsink is. If its too hot to touch for long, then it needs cooling.

If it's too hot to touch it's too late

Do the temp test w/ the fan running, will give you an indication if it's really needed (which it probably is since they put it on there.)

If it's too loud I'd replace the sink/fan assembly w/ this or this.

Thank you for the replies. I will mess around with it when I have some spare time.

Nah - the system will crash well before any damage is done to the south bridge. Anyway - it's the north bridge which is usually the super-mega-ultra hot item.

Tell ya what pilots, if the manufacturer didn't have to put a fan on the heatsink... they wouldn't.

Electronics supply places will have those sizes.

Here's one;
http://www.digikey.com/scripts/DkSearch ... t=33424060

Mobius wrote:Nah - the system will crash well before any damage is done to the south bridge. Anyway - it's the north bridge which is usually the super-mega-ultra hot item.

except his board, like mine doesnt have a north bridge

There have been instances in the past where people have run an nf4 chipset w/o a cooler, the core discolors, and the PC does indeed crash before any damage is done. but I wouldnt test your luck