Does Mosfets need cooling?

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ATWindsor
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Does Mosfets need cooling?

Post by ATWindsor » Thu Sep 22, 2005 12:06 am

I have an Asus A8N Premium, which seem to be abit of a stupid buy from me, my system is cooled with a zalman reserator, and has a 5v 120mm fan in the back (a antec p180), the heatsink by the CPU/fan is reasonbly hot, but the part just over the NB is painful to toouch and very hot, I also get a high amount of bitfaults on the nforce4-LAN-card, which makes me belvie the NB is to hot, so i bought watercooling sink for it, however, I need to remov the whole heatpipi-thingy to install the watercooling, which means the mosfets under the heatpipe-heatsink will be "bare". Is this ok? I have seen some other manufactures have no additional cooling over the mosfets (albatron, gigabyte epox), but is this advisable?

One thing i vcould do is take the ramcollers that came with the reserator, and put them on the mosfets? Would this be enough? A third option is to find some way to install the watercooling unit on top of the existing heatpipe-thing, but this seems difficult.

Any tips are welcome.

AtW

toaom
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Post by toaom » Mon Oct 10, 2005 3:19 am

Wouldn't it be much easier to add another 120mm fan to the back/top of the p180 case? It might give a little bit more noise, but a watercooling unit must be cooled aswell and usually has a cooler of its own, might aswell add a bit of additional airflow to the whole system.

Krazy Kommando
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Post by Krazy Kommando » Mon Oct 10, 2005 11:31 pm

wait, your considering a water cooling setup because your northbridge is too hot? why not just blow a 80 or 120mm fan on it from a zalman bracket?

wainwra
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Plus also

Post by wainwra » Tue Oct 11, 2005 2:23 am

You have a lot of choice here, I think. Your motherboard is very new, and a brief check of ebay suggests you might be able to sell it, and buy a replacement board, with a layout which makes better use of your existing kit.

You could even potentially save some money on the deal.

justblair
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Post by justblair » Thu Oct 13, 2005 3:06 pm

Yes heatsink the mosfets, Just heatsinked mine on a recently purchased NF7 board.

Hetasinked the Mosfets, the southbridge and everything else that made any heat. I dont watedcool though, I have a 6cm copper heatsink on my northbridge a mod I did before to get rid of noise from the standard cooler

Noticed a few of things which pleased me.

1. Under load, although I still get Vcore fluctuations, the lowest droops have been cured.

2. The southbridge is now cool to the touch. It still fluctuates in temp according to load, so I think that the heatsink is working.

3. My system is running more stable. only crashes when I attempt Vcore mods... Though less so than before I did the memory at the same time though which may be relevant.

4. Doing so had no unpleasant side effects, so while i cant quantify the gains too well, I made no losses.

My answer.. yes definately do this, its relevatively cheap, easy and cool looking (I used p2 heatsinks lying around, anodised colours, lots of purposeful looking fins) that at worst is a waste of heatsinks and in my case dremmel bits)

Not sure water blocks would be worth the expense or hassle. But you have it now, might as well use it...

teknerd
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Post by teknerd » Thu Oct 13, 2005 7:10 pm

instead of adding the compleixty of a northbridge waterblock i would simply add a 120mm nexus @ 5V blowing air onto the area around the CPU. It will give you better temps and add basically zero noise.

efcoins
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Post by efcoins » Sun Oct 16, 2005 2:46 am

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/bubo/Mosfets/mosfets.html

Rather old I know, but yes Mosfets get hot

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