Originally posted by: tigersty1e
So I've had my system for about 5-6 months now with the FSB OC'd to 450.
The Northbridge gets HOT. I can't even touch it for longer than 2 seconds. The good news is that the hotness tells me that it's doing its job. The bad news is that the chips is probably overheating.
I was thinking of lapping it and then reseating it with some AS5, but there are 2 plastic pins that might get in the way.
Is it even worth it just to add some AS5 and then reseat?
Lap?
Worth it? Up to you -- assume it'll take about 4 hours of your life for disassembly, lapping, cleaning, installation / assembly, testing, etc.
You can usually substantially improve the thermal contact and the temperatures if you replace the old TIM tape with something better like Ceramique. I'd be a little careful about AS5 though they say it is non-conductive, I think maybe Ceramique / Alumina is MORE non conductive... maybe.
You'll need some good fairly pure Isopropyl alcohol to clean the heatsink and chip top, and really it'll still do a poor job getting the waxy stuff off the chip, so you'll be scraping with a credit card and maybe straight razor blade (carefully!), felt pad, and/or involving some more nasty solvents like acetone or Arctic's HeatSink Cleaner or whatever before the chip comes clean enough.
If you're not 120% sure you can work on this without an mechanical accident and without having electrostatic discharge zapping your motherboard, STOP, it isn't worth it at all to take apart the PC. Just lower your overclock 150 MHZ and see if that helps and stop.
Use a wrist strap, grounded case, grounded work surface, etc. etc.
You might want to replace the push pin NB HS mounts with bolt/nut/washer setups that are correct in length and diameter and which don't come close to any electrical contacts on the board since you'll be replacing nylon push pins with potentially metal screws... Might want to use at least nylon washers if not nylon nuts/bolts. That or maybe you can shim the push pin mount with a nylon washer for a tighter fit if needed.
After that just make sure the HS is flat and don't use so much paste that it leaks over the side of the NB chip and gets on the motherboard / under the chip.
Keep in mind the NB mount isn't exactly stable so if you replace a thick TIM tape with thin paste there is an excellent chance it will NOT tend to seat fully / flat on the NB chip so you won't have good contact all over the NB, so check the paste imprint and the wiggle room to make sure it's always going to have snug full contact.
I expect you can drop the NB temperature like 10C over a TIM job... beyond that use more airflow across the sink for better reduction or just invest in a better NB heatsink with its own fan....
