Northbridge Chip temps....

[LatinJones]

I've got an A7N8X motherboard and the northbridge chip seems to run pretty hot. 97-101F ??

My question is, if I decided to overclock my athlonXP2500 to a 2800 just by increasing the cpu multiplier will that increase the Northbridge temps? The processor temps are pretty cool, around 41C so I'm not really worried about the CPU.

 

[jiffylube1024]

Originally posted by: LatinJones
I've got an A7N8X motherboard and the northbridge chip seems to run pretty hot. 97-101F ??

My question is, if I decided to overclock my athlonXP2500 to a 2800 just by increasing the cpu multiplier will that increase the Northbridge temps? The processor temps are pretty cool, around 41C so I'm not really worried about the CPU.

No, I don't think CPU multipliers increase the northbridge temperature. Increased FSB speed is what does it.

 

[LatinJones]

Cool. It's not much of an overclock but it just seems to speed things up the slightest bit. So if I'm not putting anything at risk then what the heck...

 

[BonzaiDuck]

No guarantees, and my experience so far leads to only tentative conclusions.

But so far, I believe that temperature increases at the CPU core are mostly due to voltage increase adjustments. With an FSB speed of 960 Mhz, my CPU temps (idle and load) are the same as they were at the stock setting of 800. When I boost voltages to get better performance, the temps go up a few degrees.

But then -- I say . . . . "mostly". Because that is what I "mostly" notice the most so far. . . .

 

[BonzaiDuck]

If your chipset is between 97F and 101F, that seems about par. The only thing to do is find out when you OC the system. I assume that with those measurements you used a tape-on thermal sensor?

Personally, my chipset temperatures haven't increased much from overclocking the front-side-bus, but they did increase slightly with a slight increase in AGP VDDQ voltage -- which is a voltage at the chipset.

 

[LatinJones]

Actually, in the bios there is a thermal probe for the 'motherboard temperature'

I don't know why I'm assuming it's the northbridge...What else might it be?

 

[imported_whatever]

it is the chipset. that is a bit warmer than i would expect, but it should be fine.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

LatinJones --

For a long time I thought the "motherboard temperature" and sensor used by MBM5 and monitoring software like "ASUS Probe" was a "chipset temperature", but I found some diagrams somewhere -- can't precisely remember -- for the "location" of motherboard sensors, and they aren't anywhere near the chipset.

The only way I was able to measure chipset temperature on my ASUS P4P800 was to use a sensor with thermal tape placed as close to the Northbridge as possible on its heatsink.

For a while I was thinking of getting a "chipset cooler" -- possibly either the aluminum or copper models made by ThermalRight. I still have an option to use a home-made bracket and a 40x40x25mm Sunon "Mag-Lev" fan (virtually noiseless at something like 8,000 rpm) to cool the existing heatsink. But when I replaced my copper heatpipe CPU cooler with the ThermalRight XP120, the fin arrangement was perpendicular to the previous model, and it blew air right on the chipset heatsink. Temps went down by five or six degrees F, and for the AGP card also by a few degrees.

Right now, at room temp of 70F, my chipset is about 82F and my GPU temperature is more like 86F. And like I've said before here in this forum and possibly the "cooling" forum, the GPU is the hottest thing I've measured in any of my P4 "builds". [So I never minded paying $30-plus bucks to put a Zalman ZM80 heatpipe-heatsink on my AGP card(s). Based on the thermal sensors and an independent reference from the nVidia driver/software which taps the nVidia's own thermal sensor, it lowers the GPU temperature by about 20-plus degrees F.]