benefits of cooling other parts of your mobo

Im curious if there are any real benefits to putting heatsinks on other part of your mobo such as the southbridge and mosfets. I know some people do it, but is it really helping any? I suppose its good to cool anything that gets warm, but has it really help get your oc any higher?

Im currently in the process of doing it myself simply cause they get warm. I'd just like to hear from people to find out if its more a cosmetic thing or a real benefit.

TKS

Yes there are benefits to doing it. Though it may be passive cooling it will put less stress on them when they are being overclocked. There is no reason if you want a high overclock not cool them. The benefits seem more hidden but they are there.

Thank You,
Daniel

Cooling the southbridge is generally considered to not be very useful. It shouldn't be necessary unless you have some problems related to it. Cooling the mosfets can be benfical, however, as it this will allow them to regulate voltage in a much more stable manner. This might end up helping your overclock.

The Northbridge is where you should have passive cooling. If not have a small fan on it. This helps in most OCing situations.

One of the nicer things I like about my SLK800 w/80mm fan, is the fan is a lot bigger than the HS allowing it to blow air down on the MB around the socket. So its cooling my CPU and around the MB. Nice secondary effect.

My Northbridge has a good size passive HS on it which helps with stability when OCing.

Yea CGR Im aware of that, I was talking more about the mosfets and southbridge. ( I have a Zalman zm-nb32j on my NB with a slk-800 blowing on it like you were describing ) Im just wondering if anyone really can say ' yea it helped me get 5mhz more on my fsb' or something like that. not just' yea it should help' . I guess Im looking for some hard proof instead of opinions, you know what I mean?

Btw, I have applied hs to my mosfets and my SB and noticed a difference. Though not much, my 5v rail seems to have stablized some what. With my cpu oc'ed it would always stay at 4.97v. Now its at 5v. I didnt change anything else in my system or settings. So maybe it is worth it.

Yes indeed cooling your Southbridge can be beneficial, in a very big way, for certain mobos...

On my Abit NF7-S with nForce Soundstorm sound onboard, my Southbridge gets to a temperature hot enough to make itself reboot. Listening to some tunes with Media Player or Winamp was enough to cause serious errors with my system, most notably the transfer of data to and from the AGP slot. With that data corrupted, the system would either; A - Lock Up OR B - Reboot.

After installing an Orb with AS Epoxy (downside being no big PCI cards), my comp ran great with no halts or any problems.

I guess what it comes down to is what mobo you are using, and what exactly the Southbridge is being used to do. On my Abit, it not only handles transfer of data between PCI, AGP, IDE, SATA, etc. and the rest of the mobo, it also has something to do with running the onboard sound.

So, if anyone is running an NF7-S and is having lock-up problems and are using Soundstorm, atleast install a passive heatsink to help quell that raging inferno, and believe me it gets hot!

putting passive cooling on the mosfets help to increase my 5volt line by about .1 to .2 Not a big deal but it helps non the less.

I think my mobo would blow up if i didnt have good cooling on NB, SB, Mosfets and Vreg chip.