X58 NB Temps High

Well just noticed a problem a couple days ago after some random reboots, my NB temps are over 90°C! I've got an EVGA Classified 3Way SLI X58 motherboard with 3 GTX680s in 3 way SLI. I just got 3 monitors and tried playing BF4 in surround and my FPS are in the low 20s and eventually into the single digits and ultimately a crash and a reboot. This would be directly associated to my NB temps being so high, right? I'm going to pull it apart tomorrow and see what I can find but for the mean time this would affect my gaming and frame rates?

EDIT: This is all at stock settings, no overclocking at all. Setup in my sig.

Its possible you just need to replace the thermal grease on the heatsink as x58 is now going on 7 years old and grease/pads don't last forever.

I'm really hoping it's going to be that easy! The heatsink is not that hot to the touch so I'm thinking it might be just the thermal grease. I have a huge aftermarket cpu cooler so it makes it pretty hard to see what's going on.

Whats your IOH voltage at? My Gene II NB gets hot real quick depending on the voltage. A fan running over the heatsink helps a great deal, often there is little airflow over the NB.

Also +1 on replacing the thermal grease!

It's on auto and is set to 1.5V. I do have pretty good airflow and fans all over the place. I will pull it off tomorrow and replace it with some AS5.

NB temps have always sucked on the X58 chipset mobos. I know the Rampage III Extreme came with an optional replacement heatsink for it's NB. Without it, you were fine under conservative setups (a single gpu, etc), but even going to a 2 GPU setup caused the temps to go up to 70c+.

New thermal paste or a spotlight fan might solve your issue.

dylskee said:

It's on auto and is set to 1.5V. I do have pretty good airflow and fans all over the place. I will pull it off tomorrow and replace it with some AS5.

Click to expand...

1.5v is really high on the NB, that's where your heat is coming from. I wouldn't go any higher then 1.35v. Stock IOH voltage is between 1.1-1.2v depending on the board.

Did the auto setting set it at 1.5v? I don't use auto for voltages specifically for this reason.

Yikes! 1.5v is crazy high. I second what Killer says. My eVGA 758 was super hot until I realized that I had miscalculated the whole keeping it within .5v of RAM voltage. Dropping the voltage helped bring temps down immensely.

Further, I found a small slot fan I had lying around from an old Asus P5E motherboard, hooked it up, and then aimed it at the component while the system was up and running. I had a temperature monitor open and basically aimed the fan's at different angles and positions until it dropped the temp the greatest. I then taped the fan in place on top of the GPU with electrical tape. Ghetto, but it works -- I knocked off 6-7 degrees doing this

The Classified 760 has a huge NB heatsink, I'm sure once the voltage is lowered temps will be fine.

Sorry my mistake, the voltage is set on auto and it is 1.1v. I was looking at the IOH/ICH I/O Voltage. I've been running stock settings for so long now I have no idea what I'm looking at anymore!

I've got the setup all torn apart on my bench right now so I'll get to the bottom of this.

Got it all fixed up this morning, pulled off the HS cleaned it all up and applied some AS5 to both the NB and SB and now the temps are in the 40s where they belong!
EDIT: After running it for a while it's hovering around 65~70° C, still pretty damn hot but nothing like it was.