Passive Northbridge cooling for nForce2 motherboards?

Ned Slider · Post by **Ned Slider** » Fri Nov 26, 2004 4:00 pm

Hi,

I'm wanting to quiet down my PC's and the next thing to go is the northbridge fan. Currently I run one board at 185fsb and another at 166fsb. Both are currently cooled by Iceberq chipset coolers and I'm looking for passive replacements.

Any thoughts on the Thermalright NB-1 but without the fan as a passive cooler.

My other option is to cut up an old Taisol cgk760002 copper based aluminium cpu heatsink to make a couple of northbridge coolers and bond them on with some epoxy.

I have good ambient temps (about 15-18C) but no real airflow other than from the 80mm CPU fan as they are bare systems in an open rack (no cases).

So would the NB-1 without fan be sufficient or do I need a bigger HS?

Ned

Post by **Rusty075** » Fri Nov 26, 2004 4:28 pm

That might work, but I would probably go with one of the Zalman NB heatsinks instead. The thinking being that the Zalman's were designed from the ground up to run passively, unlike the Tr which was designed with forced airflow in mind. If you compare the two, you can see that the Zalman uses much larger spaces between the pins, which is generally better for passive cooling. Price-wise, they're about the same.

Operandi · Post by **Operandi** » Fri Nov 26, 2004 9:19 pm

I completely agree with Rusty075 for passive cooling you'll defiantly want to go with the Zalman over the Thermalright.

MonsterMac · Post by **MonsterMac** » Fri Nov 26, 2004 9:39 pm

Yep. Zalman is the way to go for straight passive cooling, or you could almost go with the Swiftech like EdNg (for overclocking, also made to be passive, but you can mount a fan on top if you wish). Only go for the thermalright if you want to have a fan on there, it doenst work very efficiently passive.

Edward Ng · Post by **Edward Ng** » Fri Nov 26, 2004 9:46 pm

I was only able to use it fanlessly because it was so close to the fan on the CPU cooler...

Otherwise, while it may be more effective than the NB-1 when run fanlessly, I'd make no bets on it performing better than the Zalman in terms of degree C rise over ambient/$, once price difference is considered.

-Ed

Ned Slider · Post by **Ned Slider** » Sat Nov 27, 2004 2:11 am

Thank you people for your expert advice

Ned

pod03 · Post by **pod03** » Sat Nov 27, 2004 3:24 am

Reducing the chipset voltage made a big difference to temperatures for me http://www.silentpcreview.com/article164-page1.html
Mark

lm · Post by lm » Sat Nov 27, 2004 6:23 am

Shouldn't this be easy since for example asus a7n8x deluxe which has nforce2 ultra fsb400, is passively cooled by default.

Ned Slider · Post by **Ned Slider** » Sat Nov 27, 2004 9:21 am

lm wrote:Shouldn't this be easy since for example asus a7n8x deluxe which has nforce2 ultra fsb400, is passively cooled by default.

Ah - thank you, that's what I was wondering as both my boards (Abit and Epox) came with fans on the chipset as stock. So good passive cooling should be OK.

Ned

greeef · Post by **greeef** » Tue Nov 30, 2004 8:01 am

I use the blue zalman northbridge on my abit NF7, which is an nforce2 board. Even clocked up to 220FSB it's perfectly adequate.

griff

Artagra · Post by **Artagra** » Tue Nov 30, 2004 1:32 pm

I also use the blue Zalman aswell (NB-47J) on my Gigabyte NF 2 Ultra 400 board, and it's fine at 200mhz FSB - no issues what so ever.

Artag