is it a good idea to watercool the northbridge?

[rickyman]

i heard that if you watercooled the northbridge is bad.

I thought its good to watercooled the northbridge so it will not be that hot to overclocked.

[Flip-Mode]

Most people find the NB cooling unneccesary, others swear by it.
Usualy the NB fan will be enough, as the NB fan doesn't get too hot but on the NF3-4 boards its rather useless as there is no memory controller there and thats whats NB cooling for.
The NB block adds another flow restriction in the line and the benifit isn't that great.

[Category 5]

Cooling the NB will help gain a bit on the FSB sometimes...and another benefit is that it keeps the NB's heat out of the case. Without a CPU fan there is very little air flow around the surrounding components, so any bit of reduced interior heat can be a benefit. I am finding that the added flow resistance is negligable in my case (using Asetek components).

Shane

[thorilan]

it all depends on what motherboard you have

[whitebloodcell]

WCing the Northbridge eliminates one more more fan (in some cases) aswell, so less noise. Which is always a good thing.

[nstabl]

WCing the Northbridge eliminates one more more fan (in some cases) aswell, so less noise. Which is always a good thing.
no fan on the asus boards.. which now seems kinda dumb

[itchy5]

all NB watercooling (in my experience) has done is add more tubing and more heat and more hassle -.- most people cant puch their boards FSB past what air can take anyway.

[LabRat23]

My NB hit 267 on the crapy stock sink which allows it to get up to finger hurting temperatures. Assuming that if temperatures do make a difference, I would think that a good active heatsink would do all that you would need. I dont know what mobo you have, but I can say from my experience, that an ASUS doesn't need it.

btw, did fugger use any special cooling on his NB?

[outhouse]

watercooling the NB is not bad, cost effective is another matter as most NB can be passive cooled [no fan] while some need a fan and a good heat sink. on the top of the scale with max overclock yes WC may help some

[Pro*Banshee]

Usualy the NB fan will be enough, as the NB fan doesn't get too hot but on the NF3-4 boards its rather useless as there is no memory controller there and thats whats NB cooling for.



HAHAHA! AS IF! Maybe back in the day when _all_ north bridges did was control memory the stock heatsink would be enough.

On both my Nforce3 and Nforce4 boards, the Bridge chip sink got finger-scorching hot at STOCK speeds, I put aftermarket cooling on before I even started overclocking.