Water cooling nforce2 and crap passive heatsinks...

PreDatoR · Post by **PreDatoR** » Wed Apr 16, 2003 7:54 pm

Just found something rather interesting out tonight. This Epox 8RDA has a passive heatsink on the chipset. and it gets hotter than hell. Its right next to the cpu. Well was running a SLK800 with a 33cfm fan. 2.17 gig 1.8v's load temp was 120 case tem 89

swapped that out and put the aquarius 2 water cooling kit in. doing a review on it. Case temps jump up to 98F cpu temp was still around 120. Now the fan on the slk800 overhangs the heatsink and blows right onto the passive chipset heatsink keeping it cool. I reached in touched the sink last night after putting the water block back on and it was hotter than hell.

So today at work i took a hole saw to my window and put in a 80mm fan same one that was on the slk800. It blows right on the video card and the chipset heatsink...

my temps now...

case 87
cpu 106

and you can touch the chipset heatsink and not get burned. I have now 6 fan... 2 in the rear blowing out 1 in the top that goes out 2 in the front in and the side panel in. The 8RDA reads the temp from the socket and as far as i know there is no way to read the actual die temp with this board. looking at those temps i know there is no way the side fan is helping the water cooling kit cool the chip better it just isn't possible. So the only thing i can think of is that the chipset heatsink was contributing to the socket temp to be so much higher. that is the only thing i can think of and now i need to go back through and redo all of my testing for this review.

Just wondering if any of you water cooling guys have ever noticed anything like this before?

nexus_7 · Post by **nexus_7** » Wed Apr 16, 2003 7:58 pm

what I did a while ago was cut a hold in the cack of the case and then a larger hold on the motherboard holder and a slim 80mm fan blowing on the back of the motherboard...it helps alot when its hot.

Greg

wvjohn · Post by **wvjohn** » Wed Apr 16, 2003 8:11 pm

I have a dr thermal w/ a 60mm fan on my cpu and a 80 mm case fan at the back of the hard drive bays blowing across the mobo and aimed at the northbridge
-

i get 70 f 105f this is a 2100b @2336 @ 1.75

it is in the basement so it never gets much above 65F here

side panel is off case - hut case is on shelf where side panel is about 1/2 covered

the case fan dropped the cpu temp about 6 degrees

there's a link here somewhere to infra red photos of the 8rda+

NascarFool · Post by **NascarFool** » Wed Apr 16, 2003 8:30 pm

I put a Koolance water block on the NorthBridge. With a little Dremel work, I modded the original NB heat sink to fit the SouthBridge.

PreDatoR · Post by **PreDatoR** » Wed Apr 16, 2003 8:40 pm

I wish they'd just use the temps on the die would be so much nicer than a half assed socket reading which can be very unaccurate.

Lmandrake · Post by **Lmandrake** » Wed Apr 16, 2003 10:12 pm

The socket thermistor is quasi-useful at best. Blow some canned air at your socket and see what happens.

Evidently, those few mainboards that can read the AMD on-board diode are not problem free. There were articles on the web about building your own gizmo to read the diode and then send the data to a header, but it looked like a lot of work.

PreDatoR · Post by **PreDatoR** » Fri Apr 18, 2003 11:04 pm

I brought home my 1200 dollar laser thermometer from work to test some temps out... inlet temp on the radiator is only 95F and the outlet is 89F so the rad is doing a little work it seems. the block is only reading 84F but the fan in the panel is hitting it so i doubt that is real accurate. This kits been a pain in the ass first pump was going out so i got a replacement and now this one has problems after 5 days of running. when i shut down i have to smack the pump to get it to spin up or it won't.... needless to say my slk800 is going back on it later.... i don't trust this pump to last much longer.