A fairly common problem is when the computer's south bridge gets very hot. And for motherboards based on nForce, overheating of the chipset is perhaps the most common reason failure. We received a system unit based on the ASUS M2N-XE MP. Having launched the AIDA64 program, we saw that the chipset temperature reached 78 degrees:

MCP is a chipset

Many will say, “Well, what’s wrong with that? This is nForce! Yes, the nVidia chipset is a very hot chip and always got quite hot. But the colder it is, the longer it will work.

How to improve chipset (bridge) cooling

Removing the motherboard

The most time-consuming procedure is dismantling the motherboard. But in most cases this must be done in order to remove the radiator. We take out the video card, disconnect the cables and wires, unscrew the 6 bolts that secure the motherboard to the case. On reverse side of the system board, squeeze the fastener tips:

We take out the plastic fasteners themselves and remove the radiator:

Chipset (bridge) mounts

Replacing thermal paste

Now you need to remove the remnants of the old thermal paste from the radiator and chip and degrease them with alcohol. You will then need to apply new paste to the bridge.

and on the radiator:

Installing additional cooling for the chipset

We decided to take this opportunity and attach a 40mm cooler to the radiator for better cooling.

Cooler 40x40x10

We install a radiator with a cooler on the chipset. We snap the fastenings. Now you can screw the motherboard to the case, connect wires, SATA cables and install the video adapter.

The result is excellent: thanks to the fan, the bridge temperature dropped from 78 °C to 49 °C:

The temperature of the nForce chipset has dropped significantly

Thus, we protected the nForce chip from overheating and certainly significantly extended the life of the computer as a whole.

Modification of the cooling system on the ASUS P5B Deluxe/WiFi-AP motherboard.

This short review is devoted to modification (improvement) of the cooling system on the ASUS P5B Deluxe/WiFi-AP motherboard. Improving the cooling system only makes sense if you want to overclock your processor well, i.e. if you don’t plan to overclock the processor at all (then why buy such an expensive motherboard?), then you don’t need to read this article and don’t improve the cooling system, since without overclocking the motherboard works very stably and doesn’t need to change anything! I bought this particular motherboard because after reading many reviews and tests, including foreign ones, I realized that, in my opinion, this is currently one of the best motherboards for overclocking Intel Core 2 Duo processors. Even the fact that it is on this motherboard that new quad-core Intel processors of the Kentsfield family are tested and overclocked speaks volumes. By the way, to support this motherboard new quad-core processors just need to update the BIOS to version 0706 and later.

Let's move on directly to improving the cooling system of the ASUS P5B Deluxe/WiFi-AP motherboard.

1) Replacing the thermal interface on the north and south bridges.

The first thing I decided to do when I took the motherboard out of the box was to remove the heatsinks from the north and south bridges, clean off the factory thermal paste from them, and also clean off the thermal paste from the north and south bridge chips.
To do this, we will need several cotton swabs, some ethyl or isopropyl alcohol, tweezers and a flat-head screwdriver.
Turning the motherboard over, we will see that the south bridge radiator is attached to it with two clamps, we can safely press them out with tweezers and carefully remove the radiator. It may not be easy to remove, since it is most likely stuck tightly to the south bridge chip. To remove it, you either need to apply a little force, but only carefully, or pick up the heatsink with a screwdriver and unstick it with it, but again everything must be done carefully so as not to damage the contacts and microcircuits on the motherboard! You absolutely also need to do everything with the northbridge heatsink, but you need to take into account that a heat pipe goes from it to the mosfets, which connects to another heatsink and this whole system is removed together, that is, you need to be even more careful there!
After we have removed the radiators from the north and south bridges, we need to remove the factory thermal paste from them. To do this, take a cotton swab, moisten it in ethyl or isopropyl alcohol and remove the paste from the radiators. This may take some time and you will have to change more than one cotton swab, since the factory thermal paste has dried quite strongly to the radiator.
Next, if your radiators are more or less even and well sanded, then you don’t need to do anything else with them, but if they are poorly sanded and not very even, then you can level their base using sandpaper, and then sand it using GOI paste and oils (the corresponding methods are on the forum and I will not present them here).
Now you need to remove the thermal paste from the south and north bridge chips. To do this, use a cotton swab pre-soaked in alcohol to carefully wash off the factory thermal paste; do this slowly, so as not to damage the chips themselves and other microcircuits of the motherboard.
After we have freed the radiators and north and south bridge chips from the factory thermal paste, we need to apply some other more effective thermal paste. For this purpose, I chose the most affordable, and, in my opinion, very good price/availability/thermal conductivity ratio, KPT-8 thermal paste, purchased at Sunrise in mid-September 2006. The paste was in a 125 gram tube, had White color and a slightly thick consistency; by the way, its shelf life indicated on the tube is 3 years.
Squeeze a small drop of KPT-8 thermal paste onto the south bridge and spread it over the entire surface of the chip in an even thin layer. I smeared the drop with the help of a fingertip, quite conveniently I must say. You should also apply a very small drop of thermal paste to the south bridge radiator itself to avoid the formation of air bubbles from possible unevenness or roughness of the radiator. Next, carefully press the heatsink onto the south bridge chip and snap it into place. reverse side motherboard. On the north bridge we do everything similarly to the south bridge, except that the north bridge chip is smaller and correspondingly less thermal paste is needed. Don’t forget to also apply just a little tempopaste to the northbridge radiator.
The thermal interface on the north and south bridge of the ASUS P5B Deluxe/WiFi-AP motherboard has been replaced.

In principle, we could stop here, but for those who plan to push the processor very hard and may need to increase the voltage on the north and south bridges, as a result of this they will begin to get very hot. Moreover, in normal mode, even without replacing the thermal interface, the north and especially south bridges get very hot. Without replacing the thermal interface and even without overclocking, the temperature on the south bridge was up to 50-55 degrees during long-term computer games. The North Bridge initially heats up less, since it has a more massive radiator. But in order to improve the processor overclocking performance when the voltage on the north and south bridges increases, as well as to properly cool the north and south bridges, we proceed to the second part of improving the cooling system on the ASUS P5B Deluxe/WiFi-AP motherboard.

2) Additional cooling of the north and south bridges.
I probably went the most in a simple way additional cooling of the chipset and south bridge.
I glued 4 radiators onto the south bridge, designed to cool the memory of the video card from the Titan kit. I used Alsil-5 thermal conductive glue as glue.

We are done with the south bridge and now we can start improving the cooling of the north bridge (chipset).
I glued a radiator with a fan from the same kit for cooling the Titan video adapter onto the north bridge using Alsil-5 thermally conductive glue.

With the installation of additional cooling on the north and south bridge completed, we can now begin installing additional cooling on other parts of the motherboard.

3) Additional cooling of other parts of the motherboard.
The ASUS P5B Deluxe/WiFi-AP motherboard comes with a special additional fan that is placed on the radiator that cools the mosfets. In principle, it is quite sufficient if the system is overclocked.
I had to cool the air space around this radiator in a different way, since installing a Thermaltake Big Typhoon processor cooler does not allow installing this fan, because the Typhoon’s dimensions are large and the heat pipes prevent the installation of an additional fan on the radiator that cools the mosfets.
Using the same Alsil-5 thermal conductive glue, I glued a 40x40 mm Titan TFD 4010M12C fan onto a gigabit network card block - not very beautiful, but so far everything is holding together, not falling off, and most importantly, this fan blows the air space above the radiator, which cools the mosfets .

Next, I decided to cool the 8-phase power supply chips of the RIO R47 processor, which after several hours computer games heat up noticeably. On them I simply glued aluminum radiators from the TITANTTC-CUV2AB RHS rpm video adapter cooling kit.

This completes the modification (improvement) of the cooling system on the ASUS P5B Deluxe/WiFi-AP motherboard. Do not judge the article strictly, as it does not claim to be perfect. All wishes and comments can be sent to me via PM. or by email and also in the topic Asus P5B / P5B-E / Plus / Deluxe / WiFi-AP (Intel P965)

P.S. Happy overclocking everyone.

Very often, owners of budget and mid-priced motherboards encounter a problem when the chipset gets very hot. This happens because the cooling system installed by the manufacturer does not cope with its task 100%. Ultimately, strong heating can lead to the chipset simply burning out, and you will need to either buy a new board or repair the old one at a great expense. But all this can be avoided if you properly cool the chipset. Actually, this is what we will talk about today.

Replacing thermal paste

The first way that can help with cooling is by replacing the thermal paste. Many people mistakenly think that there is no difference between thermal pastes as such, but this is not true at all. Each thermal paste has its own specific properties, which greatly affect heat dissipation. When purchasing, it is very important to pay attention to the thermal conductivity parameter - the higher it is, the more efficiently it will be removed heat, which will ultimately have a positive effect on cooling the chipset.

The most popular thermal pastes include the following: MX-2 and MX-4 from Arctic Cooling, DC1 from beQuiet!, Liquid Ultra from Coollaboratory and Aeronaut, Kryonaut from Thermal Grizzly.

Installing a new radiator

If replacing thermal paste does not help in cooling the chipset, then you should think about replacing the standard radiator with another, more efficient one. Getting a new radiator is not as easy as it might seem. Even in large computer stores they are rarely sold. Fortunately, there are flea markets and foreign online stores where you can find a suitable option for yourself at any price.

At one time, some of the most popular heatsinks for the chipset were the following models: Noctua NC-U6, PCCooler NB-400, Thermalright HR-05 and Zalman ZM-NB47J. As for the first one, U6 is very difficult to find anywhere, but there are no problems with the rest. The cheapest radiator is Zalman, which will cost 250-300 rubles. PCCooler will cost about 900 rubles. The most expensive one, Thermalright, will cost +/- 1000 rubles, but the price is fair, since the radiator is really good and removes heat to the maximum.

Homemade cooling system with fan

If you can’t find a radiator or don’t want to spend money, then you can make the chipset cooling system yourself. All you need is a small fan 40 x 40 mm or 50 x 50 mm, but no more.

Some chipset heatsinks have a flat surface, so installing a fan on it with a couple of screws is not difficult. As for those motherboards where the radiator is non-standard and has a certain shape, then you will have to tinker. In such cases, “traditional craftsmen” often resort to special spacers, which are first attached to the radiator, and then the fan is screwed to them.

A universal solution for everyone

Finally, I would like to mention another universal cooling method that combines the two previous ones - installing a ready-made Deepcool NBridge 2 cooler on the chipset.

This cooling system is a small radiator with a set of different fasteners, on which a small fan is installed on top. All this works very efficiently and, most importantly, allows the user not to bother with finding other radiators or thinking about how to install a fan on the chipset.

NBridge 2 is easy to find in any computer store, and it costs only 250-300 rubles. Another advantage of this cooling system is that it includes all the necessary fastenings for different motherboards. Thus, it doesn’t matter what the chipset is - Intel or AMD, NBridge 2 is guaranteed to fit any and will do its job effectively.

Conclusion

That, in fact, is all I wanted to tell you today about cooling the chipset on the motherboard. Which of the described methods is best to use - here everyone must choose for themselves, based on their needs. If the temperature needs to be lowered a little, then replacing the thermal paste will do, but if the heating is too high or you plan to overclock the system, then you should use other options.

North and south bridges are the main components of the motherboard chipset. They are designed to control all computer devices, but if the south bridge has the role of a “little brother”, managing, albeit important, but slow processes of interaction within and between board interfaces (disk controllers, network and audio devices, etc.), then the north bridge used as “heavy artillery”, since it is responsible for the processor, RAM, video adapter, and also controls all communication processes between these components and the controller. In other words, its destiny is to control the devices that account for maximum load while the computer is running.

Location

It is a chip soldered into the motherboard, located on the northern (that is, upper) side of it and covered with a cooling radiator. The Northbridge on most motherboards is cooled by passive heat removal, while active cooling using a cooler is the prerogative of powerful systems designed for extreme loads. These can be gaming computers, graphics stations and servers.

Heatsink

A standard heat sink is enough to successfully cool the northbridge in most cases, including when upgrading the system, but there are often situations in which users overclock their computers, increasing the frequency of the motherboard, processor or video card to increase PC performance. This, in turn, inevitably leads to an increase in the heat generation of these components. And given the very close proximity to them and their own increased temperature, the factory cooling of the north bridge in such cases may no longer be enough, which is fraught with very unpleasant consequences, including failure of the chip. The result in this development of events will most likely be a replacement of the motherboard, since repairs turn out to be economically impractical.

Ready-made cooling system options

In cases of possible overheating, the search for a motherboard cooling system, as a rule, begins with determining the computer form factor. For different sizes boards (mini-ATX, micro-ATX or ATX) there are certain solutions, so when ordering via the Internet (and most often such devices are purchased this way now), it is important to take into account the dimensions of the computer and the dimensions of the installed components.

Do-it-yourself northbridge cooling system assembly

In retail outlets, the choice of such systems is currently quite scarce: mainly cooler-radiator units for cooling processors are on sale, so owners of computers that need more efficient heat dissipation most often have to assemble their own designs, showing miracles of ingenuity. Radiators from old processors are used; different ways the fans are attached, the power connectors are resoldered, and then the resulting hybrid is installed into the bowels of the computer. Moreover, the cooling efficiency is often very high.

If the situation does not allow, for one reason or another, to purchase ready-made solution, and we can only hope for own hands and ingenuity, you should stick to a few important recommendations.

• Carefully measure all distances so that the new system does not overlap the video card, RAM and processor.
• Before installation, remove the video card, RAM and, if necessary, processor. At the same time, it wouldn’t hurt to clean the cooling systems (and possibly replace the thermal paste) on the processor and video card.
• Unless absolutely necessary, do not dismantle the “original” northbridge cooling radiator. Firstly, this is fraught with loss of warranty (of course, if it is still valid). Secondly, it can be fixed to the chip using a layer of special adhesive thermal paste, cleaning and replacing which in limited space is a very long and difficult process. If the radiator is secured with special clamps, its removal will require access to the back of the motherboard, which is also not always feasible without disassembling the computer.
• In most cases, it is enough to add a cooler of a suitable size, which can be secured using super glue (with caution!) or small self-tapping screws screwed into the spaces between the radiator lamellas. Sometimes the design of the radiator allows the use of adhesive tape, onto which superglue is applied on top, and then the fan is glued (for example, Gigabyte northbridge cooling radiators).

• If it is still not possible to solve the problem without a comprehensive replacement, all actions are performed with the system board completely free of connected devices. In the case of a clamp fastening, there should be no problems, but with an adhesive base you will have to tinker. You will need a solvent (nail polish remover, lighter gasoline or vodka), cotton swabs and an old plastic card. For installation, you can use the classic KPT-8 (clamp installation) or hot melt adhesive (adhesive installation).
• Avoid contact of solvent, thermal paste and glue with other parts of the motherboard.

If everything is done correctly, the temperature readings in any of the tests in different load modes will be within normal limits, thereby extending the life of the motherboard.

photo 1

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photo 4

photo 5

photo 6

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photo 8

Many modern motherboards are equipped with an active chipset cooling system. Due to the fact that compact radiators have low heat capacity, manufacturers are forced to install small fans (usually 40 mm) with a huge rotation speed - about 7-8 thousand rpm. This design, unfortunately, has some disadvantages. The first unpleasant moment is the noise produced by such a cooler, the second is its rapid failure. Both one and the other problem lead to the need to replace the motherboard cooling system.

I encountered exactly this phenomenon Chief Editor"DPK" Oleg Danilov - his home computer is built on the basis of ASUS A8N-SLI. The fan installed on the north bridge of the nForce4 chipset in products from ASUS is known for its noise, and in Oleg’s it also stopped rotating. To ensure good cooling and at the same time reduce the overall noise level, it was decided to use a radiator. After some searching and deliberation, Oleg chose the Zalman ZM-NB47J (see photo 6). The kit includes an original dismountable mounting system, which allows installation on almost any motherboard.

Now let's look at the process of replacing the cooling system (all stages are shown in the pictures). Photo 1 – computer before modernization. To remove original system cooling, it is necessary to remove the motherboard from the case, having previously dismantled all devices that could interfere with this. Photo 2 shows the board already prepared for replacement. You need to be very careful when removing the “original” radiator; it is advisable not to use sharp objects to remove plastic fasteners to avoid damaging the tracks on the motherboard. After dismantling the cooler, it is necessary to remove the remaining thermal paste and sealing gasket from the chip (photo 4).

Then the fixing clips are attached to the new radiator in such a way that they coincide with the mounting holes of the motherboard, and only after that the thermal interface is applied.

You should install a new cooling system carefully: the nForce chipset core is very fragile and is not covered with a heat dissipator, which can lead to chips. A similar problem was encountered by users who assembled PCs based on Athlon XP and Sempron processors under Socket A. You should not use excessive force to secure the heatsink; if possible, you should fix both clips at the same time and avoid distortions. The resulting motherboard with Zalman ZM-NB47J looks as shown in photo 5.

One more fact deserves special mention - before changing the cooling system, you need to make sure that the new radiator will not interfere with the installation of the video card. In the case of the ASUS motherboard, this problem did not arise, but other manufacturers may place the chipset on the board differently. We confidently declare that the radiator we have chosen cannot be used on some motherboards from Elitegroup and Gigabyte. Also, when using passive cooling, you should take care of the flow of cold air to the radiator - install, for example, a fan on the front panel of the case.

As a result, we got a quieter computer with improved northbridge cooling compared to the standard configuration. The result is shown in photo 8.