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Heatsink Needed on Motherboard Northbridge?

jamesbond007

jamesbond007

Diamond Member
Hey guys! I have a MSI 694D Pro-A motherboard that a friend gave me a long time ago. The board is in immaculate conditon and doesn't even look used. However, the northbridge heatsink is missing in action!

The thing is that I don't know if the board works and I've lost contacts with my friend so I can't ask him. I do plan to put this on there to fix my problem, but I want to know if I can boot the motherboard up with 512MB of RAM and two matching P3 866 CPUs in there to see if the system works or not. That way I know if I even need to buy the Zalman unit. I know how fast heat builds up in today's processors, but would a northbridge be OK for 2-3 minutes without the heatsink on?

Also, if anyone knows of a quad-P3 board or if one even existed let me know. I am guessing that there isn't one made because 4 processors ususally meant that someone would have go to Xeon, but I thought I'd check with y'all first. 🙂

Thanks for the help!
 
Hm...that's quite interesting. The motherboard I have has some thermal grease on the northbridge, but that could have been from my friend if he overclocked the system and wanted to ensure stability with higher voltages and such.

This picture here is what threw me off because there's a heatsink atop the northbridge chip.

If I run the system for a while and find it's unstable, I'll assume it's the northbridge too hot? Hm, we all know heat is the source for killing electronics so perhaps I'll play it safe and get the Zalman heatsink to make sure the board lasts.
 
The zalman sink won't hurt, but if you google up that board, there are pics of it all over the net, sans heatsink....

Many of the northbridge sinks of the day, like the intel greenies, were more ornamental than functional...
 
Well that settles it then! Thanks Jhhnn for the help!

I just got my second 866 P3 in the mail today sent by another AT member...can't wait to boot this puppy up. 🙂
 
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