X38-DQ6(DDR2-1066 version) Question

[OCChronic]

Heyya, =)

I have a pretty simple noob question here. My X38 MCH(northbridge) is running hot with a system temp reading around 55 Celcius in the BIOS and Speedfan. IT runs around 61 Celcius under heavy overclocks and heavy gaming thrown on top for fun, with a heavily overclocked eVGA 8800GTS 640MB/112 shaders.

Is this normal to have these high temps?

 

[Sylvanas]

Yep, the NB's do get quite hot and that is in a safe range- anything in the upper 60's lower 70's and you might have a problem.

 

[toadeater]

I've heard of those heatpipe chipset cooler assemblies sometimes becoming loose during shipment or after installation of the board if the motherboard is bent slightly. Might want to double check if all the pins are tightly in place. But the simplest thing would be to put a low RPM 80mm fan over the Northbridge area.

 

[cactusdog]

I had a DQ6 and the board rarely went over 40 celcius (with overclocking), that seems high.

Like Toadeater said some boards had poor contact (no contact) between the chipset and heatsink so maybe check it out.

 

[TheBeagle]

Good Morning Everyone.

Having worked with P35, G33, X38 and X48 Gigabyte boards, I can attest to the fact that it is quite possible to unknowingly break the factory applied thermal bond between the Northbridge heatsink and the chip. Unfortunately, Gigabyte uses a rather cheap thermal conductor material between the heatsink and the NB chip. It sure doesn't take too much pressure (either sideways or at one corner of the heatsink) to cause it to pop loose. Once that bond is broken, the thermal conductivity goes to hell real quick. The type of factory thermal material is the totally hardening stuff, and it doesn't seem to repair itself by heat once broken.

When that has happened to me, I removed the heatsink, scraped off the old hardened stuff, put a proper amount of Arctic Silver 5 on the chip, and reset the heatsink. The heatsink will NOT be as firm as before, since there's nothing but the two corner prongs (usually with small springs for pressure) to hold it in place. However, it has worked just fine for me on the several instances where I had to make that repair. You could use the epoxy type thermal stuff to get a permanent bond, but you'll likely never get that heatsink off that chip again without destroying the chip and motherboard.

Hope that's of some assistance. Best regards to everyone. TheBeagle :beer:

 

[Blazer7]

Yes Arctic Silver 5 will do it. That's good stuff. You may also wanna consider Arctic Silver Ceramique. After some heat cycles the heatsink will become more rigid than with the Arctic Silver 5.

 

[OCChronic]

I've actaull removed the whole HS/Heatpipe assemblies, including the crazy cool heatsinks on the back-side of the mainbaord and applied sliver nitrate compund in place of the original pads tthat were used. My room temps aren't extreme either. This summer, it never got above 85F in the house and we have central air.

I still get temps around 61C off the northbridge sensor in BIOS and under a good load like gaming with COD4, or CRYSIS. I've got +.05v on the FSB voltage and +.05v on the PIC-E lanes, a 3 x 500GB RAID '0' array, an 8800GTX 640MB/112SH overclocked, and an E4500 at 1.375v/3150MHz/350FSB and 2 x 1 GB Corsair Dominator DDR2 1067/C5 @ 2.25v/1167Mhz/CL5,5,5,18,2T, TRD5(turbo)

I'm pretty sure that even tho I'm only at 350 FSB on the X38, I'm still working it pretty hard overall. I just hope these temps are somewhat normal for this chipset MCH.

 

[OCChronic]

*** UPDATE ***

I removed the tiny fan I placed on the MCH northbridge, and replaced it with a larger, older & quieter P-III 40mm CPU FAN. I've also changed CPU's and installed an E8400(45n/3Ghz/333FSB). The NB(MCH) fan hangs over the MCH heatsink a bit & provides good cooling for the heatsink/chipset and surrounding area too. It brought my temps dwon to 56c, under heavy loads, despite the increase to 485FSB & +0.25v overvoltage.

The X38-DQ6 has, so far not dissapointed me. My Sisoftware synthetic memory benches are now in the general neighborhood of 9500 MB/s read/write bandwidth, 62n latency and rock stable.

I'm now running:

+.25v on the FSB voltage
102Mhz PCI-E BUS
INTEL CORE 2 DUO E8400 @
1.3825v(act. 1.360v)/3880MHz/485FSB/
2 x 1 GB Corsair Dominator DDR2 1067/C5 @
2.25v/1164Mhz/CL5,5,5,18,2T, TRD7('turbo')
3 x 500GB RAID '0' array
8800GTX 640MB/112SH overclocked @
600Mhz-GPU/1350Mhz-SHADERS/1800Mhz-DDR3

Everest 4.5 Ultimate bench SCORES:

Memory Read: 10099 MB/s
Memory Write: 10283 MB/s
Memory Copy: 10196 MB/s
memory Latency: 50.7 ns

So far, everything is rock-solid stable and I've given it the Prime95 12 hr. blended test, on both cores, while doing my ebay thang on the net and watching movies.