ASUS Motherboard
I am looking at getting a new motherboard for my secondary rig. I have an OEM piece of crap right now. I need to get SLI. THinking of the A8N-SLI, or the ABIT K8N-SLI. Right now my motherboard runs hot. I have a Athlon 64 3200+ in it right now that is running at least 55 idle. I have two 80mm fans, one pulling and the other pushing. I can't seem to get the heat down.
MObos can create a lot of heat and make the CPU hot right.
What are your suggestions? K8N or A8N
Let me know guys!
Radio91P
MObos can create a lot of heat and make the CPU hot right.
What are your suggestions? K8N or A8N
Let me know guys!
Radio91P
0
Comments
Sorry mate, but todays mainboards are actually heating up the cpu quite a lot and produces close to the same amount of heat as a modern videocard such as a x1800/7800 gt/7900 gt.
Run a rig for a week of constant load and you can measure at least 3 or 4 spots on a mainboard that exceeds 75c. Very often, those spots are well hidden and it's very hard to have any sort of airflow over it as well. All this heat rises to the cpu area which normally are located in the top of a case.
As for the Asus A8N-SLI, unless it's the Premium, it have a very annoying chipset fan that could make anybody puke but the chipset is still warm as hell after a long period of time. If you get 55C Idle on a non-clocked cpu that's normally runs pretty cool, even with the OEM cooler, obviously, something is awfully wrong.
Now, it can be the sensor reporting the true core temperatures, but i doubt that's the case on a OEM board since such sensors are quite expensive to include in comparison to larger area sensors.
Before i make any suggestions on what hardware you should get, lets locate if you really have that sort of heat to deal with and the cheapest way is to measure the in-case temperatures as good as you can. Got any of those cheap inside/outside digital temperature reader that comes with a couple of cords for the sensor?
Have one cord routed into the case so that it hangs in the middle of the case, reporting a somewhat true ambient temperature. Leave it for 24 hours and try to determine an average temperature based on your normal pc usage.
If your cpu temperatures where true, you should have an idle case temperature at around 45c and if you do, you should look into getting a better ventilated case to start with.
This is why with the BTX-styled cases, where our mainboards is upside-down, the cpu tends to run a bit cooler and the videocards a bit warmer. I would estimate that a mainboard produce as much heat as a cpu or a top of the line videocard.
One area that many forget about is at the back of the cpu area on the mainboard. It gets so warm it's impossible to keep a finger there for more than 2 seconds. Cooling that area would be somewhat hard, but doable through the other side of the case with a mod. There's absolutely no airflow at all at the back of the mainboard.
Abit came up with their OTES cooling technology which unfortunatly got flamed quite a lot. It's a shame really cause it is/was a great idea to tunnel the mosfets warm air out at the back of the mainboard. It does eats up space on a mainboard and we demand more and more features (and to be honest, most doesn't even use half of them) that eats up both space and produces heat.
We all remember the good old days with our beloved XP1200-1400-1600 and our old Abit boards that didn't even had a soundchip onboard. Those boards didn't even get half as hot as todays boards.
I'd say the manufacturer that could start produce boards with as few features as possible and that also could knock away $50 on the price, have a winner. 2 memory slots, 2 sataports, 2 usb ports, one lan and a firewire is what most people needs. Ditch the legacy totally i'd say. IDE, PS-2, floppy and serial/printerports is in the past.
The motherboard in system 1 has ventilation holes in the motherboard tray. A step of ahead of it's time, as the case was made in 2001 (pic of stainless steel motherboard tray attached). It's a YFF-61F1. I don't thin Global Win still carries it, but another company carries it under a different brand name and model.
As for the passive cooled mainboards, i have a couple of those mentioned Asus, but for AMD. Boy, those heatsinks, including the heatpipes, gets glowing hot.
Don't even think of sticking a heatpipe-cooled mainboard in one of those up-side down cases cause the heatpipe will have a very negative effect. The heat is supposed to rise from the chipset, through the heatpipe and finally to a bigger heatsink at the top of the board. Just imagine what would happen when you flip the board around. All heat will get to the chipset instead. This is quite a dilemma for the users with the Lian-Li "V" series of cases.
I can't understand why we don't see more of the hole in the tray-thingy. It won't revolutionalize the world of pc cooling, but it definitely helps a bit.
Simon, that was for doing the classical pin-mod at the back of the board actually, but it was so ugly. It got some ventilation though
So I guess my point is that the choice of motherboard isn't going to affect how much heat output your computer has; it won't be much no matter what motherboard you get, but you still don't want any heat traps in your case.
I do think that some MOBO's give off more heat then others. Especially MOBO's that are more modder/overclocker friendly.
I will post another thread for this question.
Thanks,
Radio91P:usflag:
How much are you looking to spend? I like this one myself.
http://www.sidewindercomputers.com/minoxewh.html