Reply With QuoteI don't know, but what kind of crazy motherboard requires active cooling anyway?
The last couple of days my northbridge fan has been making more and more noise, to the point where it is now by far the loudest thing in my computer. Is this a sign of imminent breakdown, or just a hint that I should pick up a new fan sometime in the future?
I don't know, but what kind of crazy motherboard requires active cooling anyway?
An Abit NF7-S. Never had any trouble with it before. It would spin up real loud when the computer booted and settle down after that. Now it never settles down at all.
Most.Originally Posted by Christoph Nahr
Zalman offers a passive cooler that's quite affordable and should do the trick on most board.
I did however burn a expensive MSI board when mine fell of... (I'm sure that was my fault). So my next board was the Asus SLI-Premium with passive cooling.
Yeah, I've have had my eyes on that cooler and was planning on picking it up tomorrow as it's pretty darn cheap. Not really looking forward to having to take my mobo out of the case to install it though.
I suppose that should read "most AMD boards" because I don't think I've seen an Intel board with active cooling.
I have 3 abit nf7-s mb's. Those chipset fans are known to die pretty easily. I know at least 3 people with that mb including myself that have had the chipset fan die.
Try this:
http://store.yahoo.com/directron/ccba1a.html
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16835110102
I think this is the copper version:
http://www.svc.com/vansolcopvga.html
it's a pain to replace (if I remember this correctly) since the fan is held in place by two white plastic spring loaded pins. Only way to release the pins is from the BACK side of the mb which usually means having to remove the mb from the case.
The nforce 2 chipset gets pretty toasty so I would definitely recommend you stay with active cooling especially if you oc.
Last edited by ARogan; 03-21-2006 at 06:05 AM.
You might be right, I don't think I ever owned an Intel based pc.
I had an intel 478 board that had a fan on the northbridge. When it started to act up I just un plugged it.
lololol ranv
wow, that's going to suck when your board just fries out on you in the middle of playing Oblivion or something... ;)
Depends what you mean by intel boards. Mobos manufactured by Intel almost never have northbridge fans. Third party boards for Intel CPUs often do.
Na I sold the board but the guy I sold it to still has the fan unplugged. Really it doesnt get that friggin hot and everything I read says its not needed on an intel northbridge.
Also dude if you can call the company that makes the board. The guy I sold my board to called them up and they sent him a new fan free of charge. /shrug
He also said it was a bitch to install so he never actually ended up doing it.
Did you try cleaning out your case with one of those cans of compressed air? I did that a few months ago and it cut down on the noise alot in my tower especially in the fan area.
Another Abit user who had his fan die. You should be fine removing it and just leaving the heatsink.
Yeah the board the fan was on was an Abit as well. I dont remeber the model but it was an Intel 487 socket I think.
Seriously fuck the fan.
Just installed the Zalman heatsink.
Your warnings came too late for me. Anyway, removing the old fan/heatink combo wasn't that hard once I realised that I could snip the head off the plastic push pins holding it in place. then I just popped them out of the holes and tilted the case so they rolled out below the mobo. Now, properly aligning the link assembly for the pushpins on the new heatsink was a bitch. Must have taken me a good 15 minutes of fiddling to get them just right.
So now I'm one step closer to a quiet case. As for the original heatsink/fan it's a piece of crap. I wouldn't trust it to cool anything I wasn't prepared to let fry. It's just a piece of steel aligned around the fan. When I removed it I got a look at the thermal paste underneath, a blob that didn't even cover half the chip. Cheap crap, through and through.
I had mine die on my nf-7s a month or so ago. Just looked inside one day and saw it wasn't running lol. I have no idea how long it had been actually dead though. I replaced it with a vantec copper cooler and have had no problems with it.
Another vote for the "fuck the fan" option. The NB fan on my Abit IC7-G board started making ungodly amounts of noise, so I just unplugged it.
The only thing I changed was to put a layer of Arctic Silver between the fan and the chip to replace the crappy default thermal pad. I've had no problems since then.
I had an old Intel motherboard at one point -- the chipset fan broke, and the system had a constant hard drive corruption problem, even after it was fixed.
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