- Joined
- Jul 25, 2001
- Location
- Rovaniemi, Finland
I was trying to google if VRM cooling was useful or if my MB was just crappy and there was lots of discussions but no clear answers. So I wanted to make a post about my experience for anyone else out there with similar issues.
It all started when I wanted to see if my fairly late FX8320 had good OC in it. It went happily up to 4,2Ghz (didnt dare try higher) but I came across another issue. Thermal throtling. The kind of throtling that instantly drops the clock on all cores to 1,4Ghz and stays there for several seconds. With some googling I found out that this was actually not the CPU doing the throtling, CPU throtling is much more subtle "flickering" of lower clocks on random cores. The power circuitry on my MB was overheating. And even worse, this thermal throtling would occur even on default clocks in some situations like doing a handbrake transcoding or in that early level in crysis 3 where you have to destroy the defence tower.
My MB is a Asus M5A78L witch has a 140w 4+1 circuitry, a decent setup for light OC but the complete lack of cooling hurts the performance big time. Also a tower cpu cooler like my Zalman CNPS7 wont blow any air on the MOSFETs, unlike a stock cooler might.
So I was thinking about a proper MB (M5A is a 50€ board) but I wasnt excited about a complete rebuild so I dug into my drawers and found some old heatsinks from a GPU cooling kit, small glueable bits. So I glued them on my MOSFETs and someone gave an excellent advice of reversing the rear case fan which would then blow a good breeze at the MOSFETs.
So did it make a difference? I was thermally throtling on default clocks before and now I'm running a 4Ghz overclock with no realworld thermal throttling. the mentioned handbrake and crysis run without issues and only occasion of thermal throttling has been with a specific burn tests.
So I can recommend these steps to anyone with overheating VRMs.
It all started when I wanted to see if my fairly late FX8320 had good OC in it. It went happily up to 4,2Ghz (didnt dare try higher) but I came across another issue. Thermal throtling. The kind of throtling that instantly drops the clock on all cores to 1,4Ghz and stays there for several seconds. With some googling I found out that this was actually not the CPU doing the throtling, CPU throtling is much more subtle "flickering" of lower clocks on random cores. The power circuitry on my MB was overheating. And even worse, this thermal throtling would occur even on default clocks in some situations like doing a handbrake transcoding or in that early level in crysis 3 where you have to destroy the defence tower.
My MB is a Asus M5A78L witch has a 140w 4+1 circuitry, a decent setup for light OC but the complete lack of cooling hurts the performance big time. Also a tower cpu cooler like my Zalman CNPS7 wont blow any air on the MOSFETs, unlike a stock cooler might.
So I was thinking about a proper MB (M5A is a 50€ board) but I wasnt excited about a complete rebuild so I dug into my drawers and found some old heatsinks from a GPU cooling kit, small glueable bits. So I glued them on my MOSFETs and someone gave an excellent advice of reversing the rear case fan which would then blow a good breeze at the MOSFETs.
So did it make a difference? I was thermally throtling on default clocks before and now I'm running a 4Ghz overclock with no realworld thermal throttling. the mentioned handbrake and crysis run without issues and only occasion of thermal throttling has been with a specific burn tests.
So I can recommend these steps to anyone with overheating VRMs.