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Southbridge cooling...

S

Shimmishim

Elite Member
I have an abit nf7-s and i'm too lazy to see if there are mounting holes around the south bridge...

will this northbridge heatsink work on the southbridge?

look here
 
Yes but.....

You'll have to use the supplied thermal pad; I'm not sure if it comes with adhesive. Otherwise you can buy some thermal adhesive like the Arctic Silver Adhesive. Just a word of warning though, the stuff is PERMANENT.

Also, you may have to bend some of the fins if you have PCI cards in slots 2 and 3. I'm not sure of the exact SB location on the NF7-S (actually was looking at it today at MicroCenter), but that was the case with my A7N8X-D.

Other than that, I've heard nothing but good things about that heatsink. In fact, I've got one on the way from SVC. 🙂

Chiz
 
ahh great! i have no pci cards used so i'm good...

hmm....

what about the nb? there's a stock fan on it...

should i change that as well?
 
Originally posted by: Shimmishim
ahh great! i have no pci cards used so i'm good...

hmm....

what about the nb? there's a stock fan on it...

should i change that as well?
Click to expand...
I wouldn't bother changing the NB, as it has a decent looking active cooler. At the very minimum, I would replace the thermal pad with better thermal paste. If you wanted to go the extra distance, you could lap/file down the edges of the chipset and lap the bottom of the chipset cooler as it looks to be plated with nickel. The chipsets are usually concave so the most important part (the middle) doesn't even make solid contact with the heatsink in most stock configs.

 
Originally posted by: Shimmishim
what's the deal with this thing being concave anyway?
Click to expand...
Just the way they make the chip housing. Its not real good for conducting heat to begin with, and normally there's a circular nickel portion that makes better contact with the core but is almost always sunk-in when compared to the chip packaging. My latest NB version doesn't have the "silver coin", but its still concave with only the edges of the thermal pad making contact with the chip.

Chiz
 
what i did was to connect the free CPU cooler that came with my 1700+ chip(retail) and i used Arctic Epoxy to stick it there in place
 
Originally posted by: Shimmishim
wow, i'm scared to lap the NB... afraid i'll kill it ... 🙂

anyone nkow how to replace a NB if you kill it? 🙂
Click to expand...
You wouldn't be able to replace it. Its traces and soldering points are way too small and condense to try and solder (plus, there's like a thousand of them 😉). You'd probably have a difficult time finding OEM NB chips as well.

It'd also be very hard to damage the NB unless you accidentally snipped a trace or something. That packaging is like a really big, inefficient version of a heatspreader you'd find on an Intel chip. The slug/core itself is hiding underneath there, so its safe from anything you could do with a piece of sandpaper. 😉

Chiz

 
man...

okay 🙂

hmm.... interesting... tempting....

the thing is... last time i modded a board (8rda+), it died!!! and it sucked... hehehe...

hmm..

yeah we'll see... what sort of sandpaper?
 
I'd use wet/dry low grit, 400 or 600 and then finish off with 1000 or so. You don't need to be as meticulate as you would with a CPU heatsink because again, that packaging is pretty poor to begin with when it comes to heat transfer. Also, you don't need to lap the entire top, just rub down the corners; the slug is in the middle and is the most important thing that needs to be in contact with the heatsink.

Chiz
 
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