A8N-SLI Premium & Lian-Li V1000B

[lopri]

I know this has been discussed before, but I'd like to ask how other people are handling this situation. The situation being, the Lian-Li V1000B houses the motherboard upside down: This renders the heatpipe chipset cooling of A8N-Premium useless. This applies to any case to which motherboards fits invert, or upside-down.

In my case, when the CPU idles at 38C, the chipset temp is 43C. When the CPU idles at 43C (air-conditioning off) the chipset is at 45C. When the CPU is at 100% load (both core) at 58C, the chipset is at astounding 55C!!

I've been so much worried at this situation, but there hasn't been a problem yet. I've done PRIM95 10+ hours burn, and played many games, etc. While the temps are ridiculously high (like mentioned, CPU at 58~60C, chipset at 52~55C), it hasn't caused any thermal problem. My questions are following:

1. How others are handling this situation? Is it a viable solution to attach a heatsink (like a mem-sink) on top of the chipset heatsink? Can I mount a little chipset fan on top of the heatsink with some AS5 applied? Or should I mount an intake fan between the board and the case front, so at least it moves the hot air a little better?

2. Need I not to worry too much? I'm asking this because I haven't had a problem, YET. Is it OK, if not desirable, for a long term, to have the chipset temp at 40~55C? What'd be an estimated risk level?

My system has an X2 4800+ @ 2.64 (HTT220), 2x1G OCZ Titanium @ 2-3-2-5-1T, and 1xBFG 7800GTX, etc. It's my first attempt at AMD system, and while I'm extremely happy with the performance, there have been quite some stability problem unlike Intel build (which just works). Thankfully I've shot down all the stability issues (and learned A LOT in between), and this is the last issue I'd like to resolve.

Thanks a lot in advance.
lop

 

[Dr John]

The problem is even worse if you're water-cooling your CPU (no air being moved over the cooling end of the heatpipe). My idle temp was 55C. I got tired of it and just pulled the heat pipe off and replaced it with a Vantec fan and put some GPU mem. heatsinks on the MOSFETs near the CPU. Idle temp down to 40C, under full load, it hits 55C, but it used to be lower until I added the second graphics card.

I thought I read somewhere where Asus stated that the temps from the inverted MB orientation were well with in spec.

 

[lopri]

Bump

 

[ElTorrente]

I had already purchased my system before I became aware of rumours circulating about asus premiums being mounted upside down.

I just figured that I would trust ASUS on this and have been running like normal. I'm overclocked and my htt speed is 1080mhz without needing a voltage increase. It is stable and there is no problems at all in this configuration. Maybe it'll get a little hotter but the fact is that my motherboard temp in ASUS probe never gets above 38-40C at full load, and my CPU temp maxes out at around 49C with 2 instances of Prime95.

In "normal" loads - like playing Battlefield2 at 1920x1200 for hours on end, the motherboard temp never moves much from the 36C range- it's not even an issue. Who knows how hot that heat-pipe gets.. I mean if it is hot that is a good thing - it means the heat is away from the chipset.

At any rate, it doesn't matter since I'm running overclocked with a pretty fast HTT and upside down, and I'm completely stable - in prime95, or any real-world measure.

Don't believe the rumors about the upside down asus premium. If it is hotter, it just doesn't matter unless you somehow reach 75degrees or something crazy.

You may want to try and move some more air thru your case, if you are getting that high in temp. I have an XP120 heatsink and you should look into something like it. It is big enough that the big fan sits right above your heatsink for the heat pipe. On mine, I found that I was getting better cooling performance by blowing my fan away from the CPU, instead of toward it - so it was pulling hot air away from both the heatpipe heatsink and the CPU, and being evacuated by the case exhaust fan. You would be surprised what you can do to the temps in your case by messing with different fans/directions.

Edit: Oh yeah - I forgot to mention one thing in response to your original post. When I first heard there could be issues, I put Coolermaster chipset heatsinks on my heatpipe- right on the square area above the chipset. I touched it and it was very hot, so I figured why not and just covered it with those little blue aluminum heat sinks. I don't know if that was a good or a bad thing to do - but my comp hasn't exploded and it runs fine. One thing that helps me is that my case was modded by performancepcs.com with a 120mm inlet fan in the side panel, and a 120mm exhaust on top - so obviously I move a good amount of air thru the whole system.

 

[JEDIYoda]

My case was also modded my Performance Concepts!!
I have 1 fan on the bottom front nand one on the top of the case and 1 on the side of the case and one on the back of the case!
All my fans are 240 mm!!
Huge but not too noisy!!
http://www.pimprig.com/forums/printthread.php?t=19848

http://www.nidec.com/ta600dcs/ta600dcs.htm

These fans are so powerful they actually blew all the pilots out in the kicthen stove as well as the water heater!!

I had to bolt down my monitor becuase they almost blew my 21 inch monitor off the table!!

 

[SkAiN]

I know this thread is old, but just to answer lopri's original question, I read somewhere not too long ago that the Nvidia stated the maximum safe operating temperature for the nforce4 being 70C. Can't find the link just now, though...