MSI pro-e x58 Northbridge cooling

I recently bought a new MSI pro-e x58 motherboard and my Northbridge was pretty hot the other day (89C) even without overclocking, so I decided to do something.

Here's the original motherboard:



If you look at the Northbridge heatsink carefully:



There's a gap between two levels, and I found a just-small-enough 12V DC fan lying around, so I connected the fan with a Molex connector and shaped a copper wire:




and when it's attached...




Didn't test the thing yet because I had problems with the only DDR3 memory sticks and returned them back to the store, so I'm currently stuck with my old motherboard, but I have a good feeling about this.

Any comments, suggestions or questions would be welcome















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Comment 1: why having the images twice?
Comment 2: you did the right thing -- even little airflow is going to help temps quite a bit.
Comment 3: that fan might be noisy -- do you have a way to slow it down?
Comment 4: I'm not familiar with typical X58 NB temperatures, but 89C sounds a bit too high (is that under load, lots of memory operations?) -- there may be another ("true") reason for the high temps. Can you check the heatsink attachment to the chip?

1. I attached them and inserted them in the post, but they show the attached too, so.....
2. That's right, since my box doesn't allow much airflow at the North/South bridges.
3. Nope, it's not noisy at all, the fan has pretty low power usage (about 60mA at 12V and 0.8W)
4. 89C on idle, about 92C on full load after 30 minutes, not sure after. Mobo safe temperature indicates 100C. There has been people wondering about the temperature, and other solutions exists (see This post).

I will soon be applying some thermal paste later as suggested in the post to see if it gets better.

Yeah, re-applying thermal paste is a good idea. I think you want to stay at least 10C below Intel specified 100C threshold under all circumstances (including potential future overclock). Couple of other things that you perhaps have already thought of:
1. Do you know what other people get as "normal" NB temperatures on their X58 mobos (not MSI), i.e., what you should aspire to get?
2. I'm surprised that there's only a 3C difference between load and no load. Did you really load the NB? I'd say you want a lot of memory access.
3. Perhaps, you can lower NB voltage in the BIOS (maybe MSI just set it too high) while keeping system stable (24hrs prime)

1. normally people get to the 80s, and since the ambient air is hotter these days (30C-35C), i wouldn't be surprised to be higher than normal. I'm thinking of a 50-60C ideal temperature.
2. load the NB with memory access, so i should use Blend mode on Prime?
3. As long as my memory modules don't arrive, I wont be able to test anything on the board, so..... HURRY UPS!!

Thanks for the help!

Attached the motherboard....and here are the results
IOH Idle at 75C, full load on Prime95 Blend mode is 84C MAX
I still didnt apply the thermal paste yet...
try that tomorrow

I read up on the high temps of the chip on MSI mobos so I bought a couple of Antec Spot Cools.
Your trick is immediately workable, where as mine is in the mail..