Hi there,
I've just got into water cooling, basically just to see if I could do it.
After much planning and work, I completed water cooling my PC last week and it's been wonderful to have such a quiet PC and lovely cool CPU.
My PC has gone from being really stupidly noisy with ten fans to having a nice quiet hum. I'm not interested in overclocking, more in having silent running- since my PC is high enough spec it walks everything I throw at it right now.
I'm having problems with my asus striker formula ii motherboard, though. The northbridge and southbridge are running really hot and it is really difficult to put in motherboard water cooling because of the stupid combined mosfet/northbridge/southbridge heatpipe design. At the moment, I have kept two 50mm fans on the northbridge and southbridge, but this defeats my silent running idea- and the chipset is still running hotter than I'd like (around 80 degrees on load). I've been searching the web and I've not found anything suitable for watercooling this particular motherboard- just a lot of complaints about how hot it runs.
I had two possible ideas to solve this problem. I was wondering if you could advise me on whether they are 'OMG dumb you'll fry your motherboard', or a good idea, since they're both going to be irreversable.
First of all, and the one I favour, is to cut a chunk out of the heatsink and use thermal adhesive to glue a waterblock in there to sit directly over the northbridge, and essentially turn the entire heatsink into a watercooled system. This has the advantage that it should improve cooling on all motherboard parts in one fell swoop- but will I get adequate cooling?
Secondly, I thought of cutting the heatpipes supplying the mosfets, and placing a waterblock on the northbridge and southbridge chips. There is a custom waterblock available for this motherboard that will cope with its 780i double southbridge chip. The problem here is the mosfets will not benefit. Will they need more passive cooling than their current heatsinks? Installing mosfet waterblocks as well could become difficult and unwieldy to achieve.
I'd like to hear your ideas and comments, if that's ok, and also if you have any other suggestions.
Edit: Hmm, specs might be handy:
Asus striker ii Formula + integrated sound card
Intel quad core extreme Q6850
4 gig ram
asus 9800 GX2
Vista 64 bit (suckage, soon upgrading)
I've just got into water cooling, basically just to see if I could do it.

My PC has gone from being really stupidly noisy with ten fans to having a nice quiet hum. I'm not interested in overclocking, more in having silent running- since my PC is high enough spec it walks everything I throw at it right now.
I'm having problems with my asus striker formula ii motherboard, though. The northbridge and southbridge are running really hot and it is really difficult to put in motherboard water cooling because of the stupid combined mosfet/northbridge/southbridge heatpipe design. At the moment, I have kept two 50mm fans on the northbridge and southbridge, but this defeats my silent running idea- and the chipset is still running hotter than I'd like (around 80 degrees on load). I've been searching the web and I've not found anything suitable for watercooling this particular motherboard- just a lot of complaints about how hot it runs.
I had two possible ideas to solve this problem. I was wondering if you could advise me on whether they are 'OMG dumb you'll fry your motherboard', or a good idea, since they're both going to be irreversable.
First of all, and the one I favour, is to cut a chunk out of the heatsink and use thermal adhesive to glue a waterblock in there to sit directly over the northbridge, and essentially turn the entire heatsink into a watercooled system. This has the advantage that it should improve cooling on all motherboard parts in one fell swoop- but will I get adequate cooling?
Secondly, I thought of cutting the heatpipes supplying the mosfets, and placing a waterblock on the northbridge and southbridge chips. There is a custom waterblock available for this motherboard that will cope with its 780i double southbridge chip. The problem here is the mosfets will not benefit. Will they need more passive cooling than their current heatsinks? Installing mosfet waterblocks as well could become difficult and unwieldy to achieve.
I'd like to hear your ideas and comments, if that's ok, and also if you have any other suggestions.
Edit: Hmm, specs might be handy:
Asus striker ii Formula + integrated sound card
Intel quad core extreme Q6850
4 gig ram
asus 9800 GX2
Vista 64 bit (suckage, soon upgrading)