Do Heatsinks really matter to southbridge?

[screwballl]

I would assume they will do at some point but I do not know why they have not yet. I believe it is due to the legacy components like serial and parallel ports, PS/2 ports, stuff like that. Or they may keep the low bandwidth stuff on the southbridge and the high bandwidth stuff that heats it up through the northbridge. No use in keeping the traffic even and having both bridges running the same warm temperature....
although I know it is not this easy....
all this simplifying.....
I may have to toss together a "What is" article for X-bridges....

[gvblake22]

Actually there are several nVidia chipsets with only one controller chip (so it's not really a chipset per-se).

Originally Posted by screwballl

I believe it is due to the legacy components like serial and parallel ports, PS/2 ports, stuff like that. Or they may keep the low bandwidth stuff on the southbridge and the high bandwidth stuff that heats it up through the northbridge. No use in keeping the traffic even and having both bridges running the same warm temperature....

That is prettymuch exactly right. The whole point of making the south bridge was to keep slower components on the slower bus and faster components on the faster bus so the USB devices and stuff don't hog all the bandwidth being called for by the processor, memory and video card.