I think I've finally sourced the problem which is stopping me overclocking my 3800 much since putting it under water. Core temps are fine as is the memory, but i just got a random shutdown (read hard shutdown, all power straight off) when i tried to put it up to 2.3GHz. Now i've had it running well above that previously, but have been having issues with random shutdowns which resulted in the corruption of my main hard drive, so now i want to get to the bottom of it. I just felt the temperature of the heatpipe and heatsink of my passively cooled AN8 and found them to be burning hot to touch (can only touch them for less than 2 secs) so i guess there at over 50 degrees, which i would think is too hot. Since there passive and my new case has only two outlet fans (antec P180) i think this may be the issue. i'd like to not have to resort to bodging fans all over the place, but wondered if adding a front intake fan would help the situation at all. I currently have my radiator mounted on the rear outlet 120mm mount, along with the standard tri-cool fan, and was considering adding an additional fan to run push/pull through the BIX i have. I have access to sheet metal bending facility at work and so could knock up a small shroud for mounting the new fan, with a piece to channel some air over the heatsink along with the fet coolers for the cpu, do you think this would be enough, or will i need to resort to a whiny small dedicated fan blowing over the heatsink. Noise is one of my primary concerns, but i want to be able to get the cpu running reliably at 2.4 which is what i had it at with the XP-120 i was running before i went to water.
How about getting a zalman fan bracket, like the old copper fan heatsinks used? Mount it on the PCI slots and use a slow 92mm fan to blow air at the heatpipe arrangement. [edit] this one is what I mean
I don't think that going to be possible due to the position/size of the fan and rad assembly. I've just bodged an akasa amber on the outside of the case which is drawing air across the heatsink now and it's dropped the temps comsiderably, i can now comfortably hold my finger on both the heatpipe and the heatsink, so it seems like a custom rad shroud should do the trick. Now where'd i put that UG NX3 cd set again?
with a X2 your PWM temps will soar & with no cooling air from either a CPU fan (your XP-120) or an exhaust fan drawing air across the hs it's not surprising that it gets very hot.
hey tank rider, im using a p160 and it has one intake 120mm and one outlet fan 120mm and my board is fine. you need air to the north chip
I have the AN8-sli 32x, and the heatsinks are also burning hot to touch. The trick with them, is to pop them up, remove the stock material (It's a stupid oily plastic sheet which insulates), lay down the AS5 or Ceramique (I prefer ceramique), reseat them, and make sure the little pins go Click. Aside from that, there's not much you can do, the nforce 4 is a very hot chipset.
the heatsinks on my a8n-sli premium were burning hot aswell, but I did like Bbq.of.DooM said, and replaced the crappy stock goo on the chipset and mosfet, and it made it much, much better. Its a great thing to do.
You need to have air blowing over the heatsink for the northbridge on the passive asus boards in order to keep then cool. The AN32 even comes with a fan to fit incase you are water cooling.
Not to say you idea didn't work aparantely it did but if that stuff acually insulated and you replaced it with a much mor eeffective transfer goo wouldn't the pipes be even hotter? W/e if it work sure.
How about making an intake in the side panel? If that's possible, you could have an intake directly opposite the heatpipe, which should help a lot. I guess you could also try mount a 40mm fan on the northbridge. If there's enough spare capacity in your loop, you could buy yourself some waterblocks to cover pwm's and northbridge.
cheers for the replies guys, but the problem still persists of random shutdowns whenever anything is overclocked (be it gfx or cpu) and the northbrige is now running cool thanks to the ghetto fan setup. I think i'm still going to go with the custom shroud but need to start looking elsewhere for the source of the problem The pc just hard powers off for no apparant reason, and its not at full load or anything like that. I guess i'm gonna have to run some more tests to see if i can isolate the problematic part(s)
2 things that I would look at: 1) some AN8 SLIs seem to overvolt RAM by 0.2V (this appears to be linked in some way with uGuru but we're not really sure how) in which case I wuld RMA 2) PSU. with a X2 & a 7800GT I would personally be looking at something heftier than a 400W
