Heat Troubles

[Tucker]

Hi

I am fixing my brothers PC. The motherboard is an ASUS A8N-SLi Deluxe. The fan had failed on his Northbridge (common problem I believe with this motherboard) so I removed the old heat sink, which was basically a folded sheet of aluminium made into a box with a fan in the middle. I bought a termaltake orb cooler but had to change it for a low profile enzotech one as the themaltake one was two big for the two graphics cards to go in. The enzotech is a copper passive cooler.

Anyway I booted up with the Enzotech one installed all worked fine no problems. I thought I would touch the heatsink to see how hot it was and I burnt my finger I would estimate the temperate to be about 70C and that was about 5 mins after boot not under load. I turned it off at this point as I didn't want to damage anything.

Is this normal for a passive cooler? Will it be ok to run at this temperature?

[14049752]

I wouldn't trust it to a passive cooler. I just had a customer bring me the same problem, with the same motherboard.
I replaced the heatsink with a thermaltake extreme spirit II.... I don't know if it'd work for you, because it's a fairly large heatsink and fan combo, but it is adjustable so you should be able to move it out of the way of the video cards.

[Tucker]

That looks like it would work. Surprised at how much heat this chipset produces. I found a solution though. Went back with the orb cooler. The problem was that the graphics cards he has are passively cooled with a huge grilled heatsink across most of the card and the corner would not go over the cooler. What I did was get the hacksaw out and cut some of the graphics card heatsink off (about 5mm) now it fits snugly and computer is running brilliantly.