So the northbridge fan on my motherboard pretty much failed right out of the box. The chip does put off a fair bit of heat, and I found that extended use of high graphics stuff would basically render the system unstable.

So I finally get around to ordering a new fan/heatsink, and after some poking around, I ended up going with the Northpole cooling kit from Microcool. The only problem is that when I finally get it and have everything ripped apart, I realize that the northbridge chip on this motherboard is located in pretty close proximity to the video cards, and with the video cards I have (and their current monstrous cooling fans) anything higher than about 20mm will not work. The Northpole comes in at 51mm tall. No dice.

Furthermore, while I was beginning to put everything back together, I dropped one of the video cards, and knocked off one of the little electronic doodads. I’m tempted to try and solder this myself, as it looks like its pretty straightforward, and not so microscopic to be outside the range of what my big fat fingers can handle. Risky, but it would save me $300+, so I’m willing to go with it.

So the problem remains of what fan/heatsink to get. I ended up ordering a CCB-A1C from Vantec. I’m generally not fond of the ‘orb’ style fans but in this case, I needed something very low profile. At 14mm, this fits the bill.

Share