Cooling the Asus Maximus Formula Chipset
Now I don’t usually perform ghetto mods on my own pc but that all changed today. I have the Asus maximus formula motherboard and if you know anything about it, the chipset gets rather hot. After overclocking the cpu and running 3dmark 06 my crossfire video cards are at 41º C (water cooled) , cpu is at 35º C (air cooled) and my Northbride and Southbridge are in the 55º C (heatink, no fan cooling) range. I’d ideally like the chipset temp to be under 50º C.
I couldn’t think of a decent looking way to get good airflow directly on the main chipset so I grabbed a spare slot system blower and went to work. I drilled a hole into the cpu fan and the system blower and attached them with a bolt and nut. This is possible because i have a passive cooled cpu heatsink, so the cpu fan sits in the same direction as a case fan. I then added padded double sided tape to keep it from moving around.
Now for the test.. Of course the chipset is getting alot more airflow and i expected lower numbers, but i did manage to get a 7º drop in chipset temperature. I maxed out at 48ºC at the finish of the benchmark. I hit my goal by only a slight margin but it was worth my effort.
