Why would anyone put a fan on their Northbridge?

[ndee]

Just wanna know. Is it getting so hot?

 

[bacillus]

seems cooler is better!

 

[jsbush]

It gets pretty hot, and the cooler it is the more stable your system will be.

 

[ZeroBurn]

many report being able to go to higher FSBs w/ a better cooler. i replaced the heatsink on my MSI K7T Pro2-A northbridgew/ a blueorb. it didn't seem to make my 1.1ghz Tbird anymore stable above 102mhz FSB and the added 26dBa from the blueorb running all the time didn't seem worth it, so i just unplugged it. was too lazy to take it off and put the old heatsink back on, so i just have the idle blueorb heatsink on there and it still doesn't show any preformance loss from having it on all the time. could just be my chip was a bad OC'er, but it's already pretty much at the max preformance level anyway so it could just be the capped chip.

anyway, YMMV but i didn't see a big improvement.

 

[Davegod75]

peace of mind plus it supposedly helps with ocing

 

[spidey07]

On two machines (CUSL2 and the BX133 below) I could not run at 1 GHz without some stability problems.

Put small HSF on northbridge on both and now run completely stable at 1015 and even 1050.

Helped me out big time.