How do you guys cool your MOSFETs?

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ScotteusMaximus

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 2, 2005
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i apologize if this has been answered in another thread, but i'm new to these forums.

anyway, i've been overclocking for the past 8 or so years, but i recently built my first watercooled system. i'm pretty sure there's more overclocking headroom left in my CPU, but i think i'm being held back by the temps on my PWM since there's no CPU fan to provide airflow over the little heatsinks that DFI put on their board. for those of you who watercool, and those who have DFI motherboards especially, how do you keep your power circuitry cool?

edit: forgot to say, i'm using a 4400+ on a DFI lanparty ultra, non-SLI.
 
thanks for the link. DFI puts little heatsinks on them, i was just wondering if anybody had any simple ways to keep the temps down. they don't get hot enough to the point where i'd need to add a water block, but they're hotter than most of the people i've talked to who use DFI boards. it hasn't hurt my system stability at all, and they're still cooler than my P4 [email protected] ever ran, and that system is still running, over 2 years from the day i built it. i guess if it came down to it, i could shove a spare 80mm fan in one of the empty drive cages and use that to move some air.
 
the x2's draw a lot of power, on the order of what prescotts consume, expect as much out of voltage regulator heat wise
 
on my DFI Ultra board, (that is when I had the Ultra board), I was using an XP-120 cooler with a 120mm, 100cfm fan that blew on the mosfet heatsinks quite nicely.
 
ryuji said:
the x2's draw a lot of power, on the order of what prescotts consume, expect as much out of voltage regulator heat wise
Click to expand...
yeah, i expect them to get hot, and i've heard from different places that they're rated to exceed 70 degrees C without any problems, but i've seen people who have overclocked their CPUs by >400 MHz with really high Vcores, yet their load temps on the PWM never exceeds 40-45.
 
Yeah, the PWM temps are highly effected by the airflow over them. Like i use an XP-120 with a 130cfm fan on my X2 that blows nicely over the heatsinks on the MOSFETs too. To give you some idea of how much the airflow helps, if i lower my fan to 7 volts (~77cfm or so, from 130) my PWM temps go up 5C. Thats a fair ammount considering i dont have an insane OC (2.55GHz @ 1.456v) and 77cfm is still alot of airflow too.
 
DarkBahamut said:
Yeah, the PWM temps are highly effected by the airflow over them. Like i use an XP-120 with a 130cfm fan on my X2 that blows nicely over the heatsinks on the MOSFETs too. To give you some idea of how much the airflow helps, if i lower my fan to 7 volts (~77cfm or so, from 130) my PWM temps go up 5C. Thats a fair ammount considering i dont have an insane OC (2.55GHz @ 1.456v) and 77cfm is still alot of airflow too.
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what are your PWM temps at full load with your fan at full versus 7V?
 
This is how I cool my MOSFET's on a DFI board.


mosfets%20block.JPG
 
Good case airflow is all you need to keep your mosfets well within a safe operating temperature.

If you think that the mosfets are holding back your overclock you could take off your side panel, point a fan at them and see if it ups your overclock...if it doesn't then you know thats not your problem :) Otherwise add another case fan or clean up your wiring.
 
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