Gigabyte GA-7VA (r1.0?) northbridge cooling

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Air2
Posts: 19
Joined: Tue Nov 28, 2006 5:09 am
Location: Helsinki, Finland

Gigabyte GA-7VA (r1.0?) northbridge cooling

Post by Air2 » Tue Nov 28, 2006 5:23 am

hello there,

im new here and need some advice. i have a GA-7VA r1.0 mother board. this came with a fan on the northbridge heatsink.

been searching all over to find out if it is safe to remove this and replace with a zalman ZM-NB47J heatsink or similar.

at the moment i am gradually making my pc quieter. already added a zalman VF700-cu to my 6600LE 256mb agp card and a nexus 80mm front case fan. next its changing the heatsink/fan on my athlon XP2400+ and the psu.

any help and adice on the northbridge fan issue would be greatly appreciated.

cheers

dfrost
Posts: 525
Joined: Mon Feb 07, 2005 11:57 pm
Location: Seattle, WA

Post by dfrost » Tue Nov 28, 2006 8:38 am

First and foremost:

Welcome to SPCR!

If you have some airflow through your case, then the Zalman passive northbridge heatsinks work well. If you have room, you might even consider the larger variation: Zalman ZM-NBF47.

Replacing the northbridge fan (small, high speed, noisy and failure-prone) with a passive Zalman was one of my four best cooling and quieting mods.

The other three:
- Replace VGA fan with passive Aerocool VM-101
- Replace Antec PSU with Seasonic S12-430
- Replace CPU heatsink, first with fan-modded Zalman 7000, then a Thermalright XP-120 with Papst fan

scara
Posts: 112
Joined: Mon Aug 16, 2004 10:17 am
Location: UK

Post by scara » Tue Nov 28, 2006 8:38 am

Hi Air2

I used to use a GA-7VA and successfully swapped the northbridge heatsink with an NB47.

I would suggest simply removing the fan from the original heatsink instead though. Unless your case gets exceptionally warm, you should have no problems running it this way.

Air2
Posts: 19
Joined: Tue Nov 28, 2006 5:09 am
Location: Helsinki, Finland

Gigabyte GA-7VA (r1.0?) northbridge cooling

Post by Air2 » Tue Nov 28, 2006 9:40 pm

thanks for getting back to me.

i have the zalman on order from a good supplier here in helsinki. will pull the plug meantime on that noise maker screaming at me. looked at the ZM-NBF47 but dont have space, thanks for mention.

once i get this i will be changing psu for a nexus nx-3500 and (stock amd)cpu heatsink for nexus axp-3200, using artic silver 5. should be fun as remeber the hassle i had fitting it the first time.

air flow in case seems ok as system temp is 36c and cpu 54c after machine has been on for 5 hours.

thanks again

Air2
Posts: 19
Joined: Tue Nov 28, 2006 5:09 am
Location: Helsinki, Finland

Gigabyte GA-7VA (r1.0?) northbridge cooling

Post by Air2 » Tue Dec 05, 2006 2:47 pm

hi,

for those that gave me the advice all i can say is a big thank you.

new nb heatsink fitted plus fitted new psu and cpu hs&fan. the storm below my desk is now so much quieter. but i have the 'end noise' bug now. added some sound deadoning block to the old case while i had it open.

at somepoint next your it will be a new 'quieter' build. and this machine will be archived as a backup.

just hope i dont get the problem i read on another post, where the fan in their nx-3500 psu gave up.

cheers :D

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