Zalman northbridge heatsink enough?

[DunM@]

I just bought a "ABIT nForce2 Ultra 400 Chipset Motherboard for AMD Socket A CPU, Model "NF7-S V2" -RETAIL" from newegg and it comes with a fan on the chipset but I'd like to keep this machine relatively quiet so I was wondering if I could swap it with the zalman without loosing stability. If it matters I'm going to be using a 1600+ on it (as in low FSB). Any insights?

 

[Ch1m3r4]

the zalman's pretty good.

should be fine with that, especially if there is a fair amount of case airflow, as that will blow air over the zalman, which will help even more.

 

[DunM@]

Thanks, next question, how much better is arctic silver 5 compaired to 3?

 

[thezfunk]

quite a bit surprisingly

 

[chiccocool]

If you want to squeeze out your mainboard to the last Mhz I suggest you to use an active northbridge cooling. The nforce2 heats a lot when is clocked beyond the 200 MHz.
For my NF7-S I use NorthPole www.microcool.it, it works fine.
Tis fan @12V is quite loud, but if you put it at @7V or better @5V is a perfect solution. Further the Sunon MagLev fan is really the best.

 

[DunM@]

I'm not really planning to OC it to the ends of the earth, I'm just going to push it as far as it will stabily go WITHOUT sunon noise levels... I know I know, water cool it, but I don't have that kind of money just now.