My Giant Heatsink Fetish

Jeff Atwood

19 Oct 2006 — 1 min read — Comments

One side effect of building quiet PCs is that you tend to develop a giant heatsink fetish.

From left to right:

Arctic Cooling Accelero X1 on the ATI 1900XTX video card
Thermalright HR-05 on the Intel 965 northbridge chipset
Scythe Infinity on the Core 2 Duo CPU

It pains me to replace the northbridge cooling on the Asus P5B Deluxe, which already includes a luxe heatpipe and radiator arrangement. But it wasn’t working for me – I had serious overheating problems very specific to the northbridge.

I guess that’s not too surprising if you consider that modern Intel northbridges dissipate almost 20 watts under load.* For comparison, Intel CPUs didn’t dissipate more than 20 watts under load until the introduction of the Pentium II 450 in 1998.

*More like 30+ watts if you’re using the craptacular integrated graphics on some motherboards.

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