Cooling choice for power regulators?

Z

Zinn

Guest
I've got an X38 board with one of those stupid heatpipe coolers that covers the northbridge, southbridge and CPU power regulator area. I can easily find aftermarket sinks for the nb and sb, but are there aftermarket sinks for the power regulator thingies? Is this even some sort of standardized thing, or am I out of luck?

I have a bunch of old ram sinks I could epoxy on, but would those be adequate? My goal is to improve the cooling from the stock piece of shit so I don't know how effective those would be.

I don't have a dremel handy, so hacking the heatpipe assembly up isn't really an option.

Thanks in advance.
 
I think the CPU power regulator area is known as MOSFET and deal with PWM temperatures and there are coolers available for them:

http://www.thermalright.com/new_a_page/product_page/product_mosfet_cooler.html

Thermalright has some great MOSFET coolers but you have to check compatibility with your board. If you dont want to remove the heatpipe coolers that span the NB, SB, and power regulators, then you could always direct a fan toward the area of the power regulators.
 
Installed properly the heatpipe is actually hard to beat for cooling performance. The catch is the "properly". Removing the pipe, replacing the thermal compound and mounting hardware and putting a small fan on one of the heatsink/radiator sections with RTV silicon glue will make it work superbly. Lot cheaper and easier. If you want to get radical you can make backing plates for the MOSFET sections out of scrap metal (insulate them from the bottom of the board) or some thick stiff plastic material) to ensure the gap is small enough to use thermal paste instead of the pad.
 
BillParrish said:
Installed properly the heatpipe is actually hard to beat for cooling performance. The catch is the "properly". Removing the pipe, replacing the thermal compound and mounting hardware and putting a small fan on one of the heatsink/radiator sections with RTV silicon glue will make it work superbly. Lot cheaper and easier. If you want to get radical you can make backing plates for the MOSFET sections out of scrap metal (insulate them from the bottom of the board) or some thick stiff plastic material) to ensure the gap is small enough to use thermal paste instead of the pad.
Click to expand...
That's probably not a bad idea. Ideally I would be using the little optional fan that came with the board and my own Zalman STG1 thermal paste, but the piece of crap burned out as soon as I turned the it on. The blade spun around once and then the motor shat out.

The top of the northbridge heatsink is curved so it would be really hard to glue a 50mm fan on as I did on my Gigabyte 965 board. I guess I could glue it to one of the sides... I think I'll do that, it beats paying $60 for aftermarket junk.

I've got some nice thermal compound and fans lying around so I'm sure I can rig something up. The X38 chipset is HOT, even hotter than my old 680i board...
 
I was just presenting an alternative, I did the above on my P965 board and got excellent results. Any directed airflow will work and #4-40 size hardware works great.

There are several posts detailing the procedure and a goggle of "heatpipe mod" will provide some walk throughs but there is really nothing difficult about it.

LOL I noticed I never aswered the original question, yep ramsinks would work fine and sometimes one of the older bigger sinks will cover 2 mosfets, just depends on layout.

The other thing is the air movement I keep harping on, with a tower heatsink the blow by of the stock downward intel fan is gone so anything you do to get some air moving in the area around the cpu socket down low on the board is a big plus for stability.

Does not have to be fancy. :D

http://mysite.verizon.net/ressdxka/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderpictures/computer003.jpg
 
I have to agree with Mr. Bill Parrish here. Air flow is very important to overall good temps in your system. The case I have used in the last two builds had a front 120 fan mounted in front of a side ways hard drive cage. I don't know if you ever saw one of these setups, but it completely negates that front intake fan. So after testing, I was not thrilled with my overall temps. I then figured out a way to mount another 120 fan on the backside of the hard drive cage to give air flow directly onto the motherboard. I saw a noticeable difference, not just in MB temps but I also saw a 4C drop in CPU temps as well, also saw a couple degrees drop in PWM area as well. The motherboard had a real noticeable drop, like 6-7C with this fan installed. This just goes to show you, that you can have the best heat sink, but it will not function up to its optimal level without proper case air flow.

Sorry for the long explanation.
 
Ryck, I actually removed my front hard drive cage because I didn't like how it was blocking airflow. I keep the drives mounted in the bays with no active cooling on them. I've been running hard drives like this since forever and never had one fail, so doubt that's a big deal, but yeah, I'm doing the best I can to keep air moving through my smallish PC-65B. Even so much as to chop a crude hole into the back for an extra 80mm fan (stock case comes with one rear fan)

Bill, what you have there is almost exactly what I had going on my Gigabyte 965 board, and it worked pretty well. I was originally concerned that the stock heatpipe thing on this board was completely useless, but you've convinced me to give it another shot.

I have the 9700 pointing at the back of the case, it should be hitting the Mosfet heatsink like this... do you guys think this will be adequate enough to forego active cooling directly on top of the mosfet sink? My load temperatures are between 50-53 C as measured by the motherboard. Don't know if that's too much.

mobo.jpg

Forgive the cabling, I just installed this yesterday.

As for the Northbridge, just look at that shitty heatsink. The thing is more of a decoration than a heatsink, it's a copper plated aluminum sink, and I suspect it's not making much contact at all as it barely warms up under load. I'm gonna try gluing a 50mm fan to it and switching for AS5...

Thanks for the suggestions.
 
Ryck said:
I have to agree with Mr. Bill Parrish here. Air flow is very important to overall good temps in your system. The case I have used in the last two builds had a front 120 fan mounted in front of a side ways hard drive cage. I don't know if you ever saw one of these setups, but it completely negates that front intake fan. So after testing, I was not thrilled with my overall temps. I then figured out a way to mount another 120 fan on the backside of the hard drive cage to give air flow directly onto the motherboard. I saw a noticeable difference, not just in MB temps but I also saw a 4C drop in CPU temps as well, also saw a couple degrees drop in PWM area as well. The motherboard had a real noticeable drop, like 6-7C with this fan installed. This just goes to show you, that you can have the best heat sink, but it will not function up to its optimal level without proper case air flow.

Sorry for the long explanation.
Click to expand...

I just want to say thank you for the amazing idea, i'm going to install a fan behind my hdds :p
 
A little fresh air blowing across the motherboard goes a long way in cooling, and if you have another fan redirecting the fresh air down directly onto the hotter areas, well, that's just a added plus..........:D

dsc00255ej2.jpg
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top