IC7-G Passive NB Cooling

Is it "ok" to cool the Northbridge chip on an IC7-G with just a larger heatsink? I'm thinking about the Zalman ZM-NB32J, without a fan.

The reason I'm asking is because I had 2 of the NB hooks break off, and I am not in the mood to start soldering them back on. Also, the fan is very loud and if possible, i'd like to remove it.

Any opinions?

If it were my board, I would epoxy glue those hooks back into place.

You doesn't look so heavely overclocked, so I guess it would work if you have at least some air flowing through your case.

Just keep an eye on your temps.

How will you attach the heatsink? I fixed a friend's N/B sink that pulled the loops out by just AS epoxying the sink directly onto the chip. If you get a decent heatsink, it'll probably be fine passively cooled, as long as the FSB is not high and as long as you have good case ventilation. There are a lot of P-4 mobos floating around that have passively cooling N/B chips (although these are not usually overclocked).

attaching ZM-NB32J to an IC7-G

My original nb-fan was very noisy, so I bought a zalman NB32J passive cooler to replace it. Since there were no "hooks" attached to the passive cooler, I had to improvise a little.

I used the original ring of metal which kept the old fan attached. The idea was to make the passive cooler fit into the ring. To do this I had to cut of three of the pins in each corner. Because of the flexibility of the metalring, the passive cooler was now firmly attached to the GPU.

pics of the IC7-G with ZM-NB32J:

http://marius.lsdata.no/Darx/nb/overview.jpg
http://marius.lsdata.no/Darx/nb/nb.jpg
http://marius.lsdata.no/Darx/nb/close-up.jpg