Do Heatsinks really matter to southbridge?

[azianai]

I just picked up Zalman's ZM-NB47J to stick on my Asus P5N-E SLI Southbridge. Now I'm just wonderin, does this actually make any significant difference at all? I read some people said a 2-3 degree cooler, but I can't find a difference, the heatsink itself gets hot just like the stock Northbridge.
Stuck it on with AC5, maybe i should get a new heatsink for the Northbridge too? Can't get a fan sink for the southbridge since my 8800 wouldn't fit then lol. And a Northbridge can't be fan-ed either or the CPU Sink/Fan wont fit. I think I bought the wrong board haha, oh well.

[Yellowhello]

The northbridge definitely gets hotter then the southbridge... You can use PC Wizard 2008 to monitor your chipset temps. You don't really want them to go over ~60C, ideally you want them around 40C. Basically I would have some passive cooling on the southbridge and only have active or even water cooling on the northbridge if you have some crazy FSB for an overclock.

[azianai]

I guess my only real issue is that the board i got has everything all cramped up, I can't even find a replacement heatsink/fan for the processor that wont require removin the stock northbridge, but even that's a question since i can't find a replacement northbridge that'll fit with an aftermarket sink/fan as well. Interested in watercooling, but dont know how to do it and i think i'll have to buy a new case too since the solo isn't very compatible lol

Right now everything's runnin stock (CPU/GPU)

[gvblake22]

Back in the AMD Socket A days, I had to put a small passive heatsink on my Abit NF7-S rev. 2 southbridge because the onboard audio was crackling when it got too hot. Usually though, extra cooling for the southbridge is not necessary.

[Death_blooms]

What is the purpose of both the north & south bridge?

[One4yu2c]

The North and Southbridge basically direct traffic across all of the subsystems on a motherboard - PCI slots, RAM, frontside bus, onboard goodies, and everything else. That's oversimplifying, but still the gist of it.

And this brings up a good point. We generally take for granted everyday computing terms, but I see a guide in the making...

[Dr. V]

Originally Posted by One4yu2c

The North and Southbridge basically direct traffic across all of the subsystems on a motherboard - PCI slots, RAM, frontside bus, onboard goodies, and everything else. That's oversimplifying, but still the gist of it.

And this brings up a good point. We generally take for granted everyday computing terms, but I see a guide in the making...

Yeaaa - I was gonna start up a guide for all terms really generalized, but I decided to go straight for a RAM guide since a lot of people seem to be confused with RAM these days.

Great guide topic though.

Speaking of topic - regarding the thread - a southbridge cooler often deems itself as useless...

[gvblake22]

Originally Posted by Death_blooms

What is the purpose of both the north & south bridge?

Indeed, Paul has a good "oversimplication" of it. You can also think of it like the traffic controller for the different parts of the motherboard and peripherals. While chipset and platform architectures vary among brands and versions, the South Bridge is usually concerned with the PATA and SATA devices (hard drives, etc), onboard sound, onboard network controllers, USB, Firewire, and slow PCI slots. The North Bridge usually deals directly with the processor, RAM, and faster AGP or PCI-Express x16 slots. But the South Bridge has to still go through the North Bridge for access to the processor, RAM, etc...

[Death_blooms]

parts of the motherboard are just something i've never realy got to grips with. Obviously not including all the connectors I use when building.

[Stormcrow]

Is there a way scientifically speaking to combine the Bridges together on one chip? Like how AMD's memory controller boosts performance, I bet if there was only one bridge that had to handle requests it would speed everything up considerably.