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Hello again, and thanks for visiting the mattgadient.com website.
Today we're going to be taking a look at reducing the temperature coming from
the northbridge of your MSI X58 PRO-E motherboard.
Now
for those joining from YouTube, if you'd like, you can visit the mattgadient.com
website and read the write-up there.
And before we actually get started with the "how-to", we're just going to go over some of the
heat issues themselves.
Now
there have been a lot of reports if you google around for this motherboard and search
for "IOH" or "northbridge"
you're going to see that a lot of people have been reporting
temperatures of 80-90 degrees celsius and you'll see people are pretty
worried, they're
"oh no!", you know, "the temperatures are really high, what do I do!?"
"Is my motherboard gonna die?!"
Now Intel does state that 100 degrees celcius is the maximum safe
temperature
for the
northbridge
and...
so you are within the
guidelines when you're running at 80-90 degrees.
However this doesn't leave you a lot of headroom. It's possible to get really
close to the thermal limit,
particularly if you're in a warm room or a warm house, or
for those people who are overclocking,
and exceeding the thermal limit can drastically reduce the life of the
northbridge & basically your motherboard.
Generally you want to try and keep things as cool as possible - things tend to last
a lot longer when they're cool.
So the question becomes, what can we do to cool things down?
Well we've got a few options
The first one is, you can purchase an aftermarket northbridge heatsink.
This tends to work really well - you actually have the best potential gains
if you get a high quality one.
The downside though is it's kind of costly
and you'll have to
buy a southbridge heatsink too, because
by default the north and south-bridge heatsinks are linked by a
heat pipe, so you've got a lot of added cost there.
The second option is to
replace the thermal interface pad with a quality thermal interface paste,
so you can use something like Arctic Silver, OCZ makes some stuff,
CoolerMaster... there are a lot of good quality thermal pastes even better.
But there are some pretty good potential gains. You might see 10 degrees, maybe 20 degrees
celcius difference
and cost-wise, you can usually get a tube of paste for under $10 -
t'll last for a lot of heat sinks
and the other advantage is you might actually already have some paste around
so you might not be spending anything.
Third option is to simply attach or glue fans to the existing heatsink.
This can be pricey depending on the fan that you get.
The down side is a lot of the cheaper fans tend not to last very long, and they're pretty
noisy
and if you need to detach the fan in
the future to replace it,
you might have trouble pulling it off of the glue.
So not the greatest option, but a decent one.
So we are going to be choosing the 2nd one
for this
overview.
Simply the first one is just too costly to justify for this motherboard
the MSI
X58 PRO-E motherboard is one of the cheaper
motherboards
and really if you're going to be spending all the money to get an aftermarket northbridge
heatsink, you may as well have just stepped up to a more pricey motherboard that's
got a better default one built in.
The third option is
definitely a viable one but it's pretty ugly and like I said, the fans can be pretty noisy.
So,
we're not going to do that one.
So now that we know what we want to do let's figure out how we're going to do it.
So first up we're going to identify each of the heatsinks.
This first one that says "DrMOS" is for the mosfets. You are going to be leaving
the one alone. I ended up taking it off and replacing stuff but uh... I'll mention
later why you might want to just leave it alone.
Now you'll see in the top kind of moving towards the left is the northbridge
heatsink that's the one that's getting really hot and that's the key one we're
going to be replacing.
Just above it though you'll see the one that says "MSI" is for the south bridge
and that one is going to be coming off and we're going to be
putting some thermal paste on there too,
but it's not our biggest concern.
So now you'll see that we've got the motherboard flipped around and you'll see
I'm removing the screws
Just again, you're removing the screws for the northbridge and the southbridge
heatsinks. Those are the 4 you can see towards the middle.
One thing to note is
that with the screw there's also a little spring and then there's also a little
black washer.
You'll see me grabbing those washers right away. Make sure you don't lose them - they're pretty small, pretty easy
to drop,
and if you forget to put them back on later, you might have the screw shorting out
something in the case or putting undue stress on the motherboard or something like that...
So be very careful
when removing them and make sure you don't lose them.
You'll also see right away in the upper right, I will be removing the
MOSFET heatsink as well.
Now the big reason why I said earlier not to do this is because it uses a
very thick pad...
and there's a very good reason that it does.
The mosfets are actually slightly below some of the other components,
and if you take off that pad...
and you put the heat sink back down, that heatsink might start shorting
out other things on the motherboard. That pat actually elevates
the heatsink
from all the other components.
So you can do it
if you really want to, but you're either gonna have to use another pad,
or you're going to have to modify the heatsink, and I'll show you a little bit about that
when we get to it.
In the meantime, just finishing... trying to peel off those last 2. Those last 2 don't peel
off by the way.
Ok, now with the board flipped over,
you can see I'm wiggling here...
This is another area where you want to be really careful. You don't want to use a
screwdriver to try and pry anything up, or anything like that,
or you could very easily damage the motherboard.
Just carefully you want to wiggle back and forth
until you get them all off.
There you'll see I just took off the mosfet one.
And now we'll be working on the others.
Now you want to work on the north bridge and south bridge at the same time,
just because if you get 1 loose,
you might crack that heat pipe. So you want them both to kinda give the same time.
You'll see this actually takes me quite a while - I'm going to be spending about a minute
here
just wiggling
side to side, back-and-forth, up-and-down.
Eventually it will come but you do want to be careful.
If you try and force it,
what might happen is you might
crack some of the die on the northbridge
which would be really bad because than your motherboard is basically a piece of
garbage now.
So here you'll see right away I should be getting it to
come a little bit loose,
but you'll see it does take a lot of time. There we go.
It just popped loose.
There's the heat sink with the
pad that it's got on there.
You'll see a little pad is stuck to the northbridge as well.
Now you'll want to be scraping off the pad.
You can probably use a fingernail,
or you can use a knife as well.
Now here you'll see I've already put some thermal paste on both the southbridge and the
northbridge
after cleaning them up.
One thing that I do strongly recommend
is after you've put on the thermal paste, put the heatsink back on, and just push it down with
finger pressure, and then lift it up and make sure some of that thermal paste transferred
to the heat sink. If it didn't,
then you might have issues where
the heatsinks aren't actually contacting anything, and when you start up the
computer things will overheat very quickly.
And that would be bad.
Now once you've made sure that you've put on enough thermal paste and that the heatsinks are making good
contact, installation is just the opposite of removal.
Remember again to use those little black washers .
Now or what I'm going to show you next is basically a little bit of the
details if for whatever reason you are determined to
replace the thermal pad
for the mosfets with some
thermal interface paste,
I'll just show you some of the stuff that
has to be done.
We're running short on time for this video, so I'll try to be quick.
You'll see here that I used electrical tape to cover up
all the little components around those mosfets. That's to make sure that
there is no way the metal from the heatsink is going to touch any of them and short
something out.
You also want to use a thick amount of thermal paste.
You're also going to see right away that I had to grind down part of the
heatsink...
That is done because otherwise you are not going to get good contact -
the heatsink will touch the other components.
And finally, make sure that it is secured, and
making good contact and you should be good to go.
Now if you've just seen the video and you're thinking "Oh no, I'm not sure if this is.."
"...something that I.."
"...you know.."
"...feel..."
"...safe doing", please don't. Just do the method where you tape a fan to the heatsink. You'll at least get
a little bit of improvement if you tape it or glue it on.
For anyone who is going to be doing this anyway, I hope this has helped you out a little bit.
And for everyone else if you'd like to read the write-up it's available at
mattgadient.com
Until next time...