Rigged for silent running

[Farabomb]

In my quest for a quieter air cooled computer I've come to wondering. Is the active cooling for the northbridge really needed? I was looking and I noticed that that the ASUS A7V333 has passive cooling. That got me to thinking. I have a A7V266-E with a blorb that I put on well..... mainly because I thought it was pretty. I put one on my Radeon too, untill I put my finger in it while it was running. That caused a little blood and a LOT of cursing. Now that I have most of my fans on rehostats I can cut rpm's and noise when I go nite-nite. After turning all the fans down I noticed how damn loud the blorb is. After unsucessfully trying to remove blorb from the N.B. (Around the time I started seeing the BGA DDR heatsink horror pictures so I didn't try too hard) I gave up and delt with it.

Kicking around in my drawers of parts I noticed the dead blorb and picked it up. I swear I saw that lightbulb you allways see in the cartoons. If the fan's too loud then take it off. If the KT333 can get away with passive cooling why can't the KT266A? I'm going to see if it's still stable at 11x 153fsb but I don't think I'm gonna have any problems. If anyone out there has gone this road before please let me learn from your mistakes.

Sorry for being so long winded for what ammounts to a synapse but I just played 3 hours of roller hockey and I can't do much more than type right now.

[mdzcpa]

I beleive the active cooling is helpful if you plan on really pressing the FSB up high...otherwise passive cooling will likely work just fine. A buddy of mine removed his KR7A northbridge fan (when it quite working) and never replaced it. He still has no trouble running 166fsb day in and day out. He may have lost some stability at the the higher speeds (178+), but he does not operate in that range, so he does not care.

Hope this helps:)

[lechumbl]

Hi Fara,

I agree with Mike, if you aren't pushing it, there is no need to have the fan on the bridge.

I have the 266Pro mobo and have no fan on it and it works fine.

My FSB is no where near 178 or so, and it is not a problem.

Take care........

[Farabomb]

If I could get the fsb even close to 170+ I'd be happy as a clam (who knows how happy a clam is? has anyone asked? maybe they're pissed all the time..) I can't get it to go over 152 and be stable. It won't post at 160 and if I try to upgrade the bios I loose most to all my fsb o/c ablity. I'm using an old beta bios I found on ASUS germany's FTP way back when I got the board.

Next project is watercooling. After reading about how good Dicki's computer got at swiming I'm a little less worried. I just still have some questions that I'm going to post in the water section

[mdzcpa]

Post away in the water cooling forums:)

[Farabomb]

Well it seems something does not like me. In the last day I bsod'd twice. I've been running 2k/XP for so long I allmost forgot what it was. Now I have 2 options 1: put the loud fan back on and deal till I get the h20 system up 2: cut the voltage to the fan to cut noise. One problem with that. Normally I would use the +5v as the ground to cut voltage to 7v. But, I have the fan plugged into the board so I've lost that option. Now the thought I just had was to put the same resistor I use to cut 12v down to 5v or so to run some LED's off a 12v source. I'm just curious if that will work? Otherwise I have to get moving on the h2o sooner than I planed. Rushing=bad and I'd rather not do that.