NEW Water Cooling NB poll

definately not useless IMO. Definately people for going for a silent rig route. I dont want some noisey 50mm spinning @ 5000rpm in my case.

No not at all if you have the sub system to do it it just makes sense to do it. besides I'd water cool the fans if I could!

Why ? Becuase I can simple as that

This thread was started back in 2003. But no, watercooling the NB is not overkill. I'm going to as soon as I order a WC setup.

I think it's a waiste of time, mine was getting very warm so I put a large passive heatsink on it and it's fine now, no more heat.

not overkill, one less fan to worry about making noise.

y2jed_2000 said:

not overkill, one less fan to worry about making noise.

Click to expand...

Very true, I personally dont think its an overkill.

Depends on your NB your cooling, I know it was semi-useful w/ the nF2's cause it held the mem controller, but w/ the nF3 and nF4 it isn't as important.


BUT THE nF3 is usually passively cooled, even w/ my DFI board, it gets EXTREMELY hot, too hot to keep touching :/

Unless you want a silent PC I do not see the need of adding anything that will not boost performance into my WC loop.

You do gain something with WC the NB.
But overkil is problem just with restrictive WB.
I personally like NB WB that are as little restrictive as possibe, coz NB needs wery little cooling comparing to CPU and GPU.

I would watercool the NB if I knew that it was problematic and needed to be addressed. If your on a budget, skip the NB block.

I don't think that it's overkill, my next setup is getting NB block.

I think it's a matter of preference IMO. You'd be alright without it but it's a free country.

i have had the nb water cooled, and havent, i saw no performance increase with the nb block, however i did see a 2c decrease in cpu temp just from pressure drop.

but yea, mostly it preferance, aswell as what chip is used

I will say that many of the motherboards I've bought have a stock cooler on the NB thats just barely above pointless.

But, I'll also say that water cooling a NB is as needed as watercooling a HDD.

What did the old Raptors and WD2000's put out heat wise? Around 8-12 watts, close to 20 on spin up. Isn't 8-12 the average for a NB? Maybe like 15-20 on a board or two on an extreme overclock? Will you get extra performance out of a HDD from watercooling it? No, but can you get more performance out of NB with water then air? Not thinking so. How about a Swiftech MCX159-CU (run passive) as some blocks will run about the same in price or even better, how about an old XP cooler run passively. How many still have these laying around? You might say it's too big to fit but we know thats not hard to get around. I've got a friend that was able to get one to fit under a graphics card using only a dremil to cut a row of blades out, a drill for mounting holes, and his fingers for fanning the rest of the blades out around his card (looks pretty cool).
He's not an engineer nor does he even have machining tools. Actually he did it in the college style dorms he lives in.

Bash if you like, but best I can tell watercooling a NB isn't really for cooling the NB. It's to look pretty.

Good article Revivalist, thanks for the link.

I'm sorry, but I can read graphs till I turn blue in the face and it's no substitute for actually trying it out.
So I did.

Adding a Maze4 chipset block to my loop lowered the northbridge temp by an average of 7C without impacting the CPU or GPU temps at all.

This had no effect on OCing (which I didn't expect anyway), but a fan was eliminated and temps are lower, so I'm happy.

i said yes because if you have a good board then you dont needa watercool it and it makes more sence to spend money on a good bard then to spend it on a waterblock seeing how it willl decrease the loops performance

IMO the gain from stock->aftermarket cooling is far greater than aftermarket->Water. so it really is overkill.

just adding a small fan greatly improved results using a stock heatsink I dont see how adding it to an already warm WC loop would benefit it more. I suppose if you wanted to go all out you could.