Northbridge Fan

ming

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17 Jun 2003
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Here I am again. I swear I had one posted before... probably got lost.

Anywayz, Can anyone suggest how I can lower the NB fan on my motherboard. It's spinning at around 8133rpm and it's bloody noisey. Please don't recommend Speedfan - it's as useful as sh!t.
 
i don't think there is a way to lower the NB fan speed...... or at least i've never heard of one. could always try going a passive route, and buying one of the fanless NB coolers.... just make sure that a case fan is kinda blowing across it.
 
MSI boards suck so far as the northbridge. My fan is buzzing too, and then MSI sent me the wrong replacement. It is under my video card so I cannot get too tall of a replacement.

I am going to use a old aluminum HS I have off a P3 without the fan and let it be passively cooled. Just need some thermal tape to adhere it with.
 
Yeah, the NB HSF sits right under the GFX card. There's no way to replace it with say Zalman heatsinks.
 
You could go out and get a universal northbridge fan at any comp store and replace the one you have. If I remember correctly they do have different rpm speeds. But also I think that their speed on the oem fans (the one that actually came with MoBo) are thermally controlled, well some of them anyway. So if your MoBo is getting excessively hot the speed goes up to it's max rpm. Maybe see if there is an accumulation of dust in your box and on the fans and clean them out. Maybe that could slow it up a bit, again only if it's thermally controled. Or it could be out of balance from dust all over the fan blades.
 
I assume it has a 2 or three wire connector that plugs into a MB header?

Cut the red wire and put one or two 10 ohm resistor in series. You can get a 2 pack at radio shack for $1.50. The resistor drops the voltage a couple volts slowing the fan down below it's high whine range. Note this also reduces cooling so be careful. The resistor needs to be at least a 2 watt rating, preferably 5 watts or it will get too hot. You can use two 5 ohm resistors in series to get the 5 watts.

Second choice is to get a fan speed controller. Cut the red and black wires and run them to the controller red and black wires if the controller doesn't have an adapter. If there is a yellow wire it should still get plugged into the MB. It is the fan speed sensing.

I quieted a noisy thermaltake this way and ran it for 2 years before I sold it this christmas.
 
nads had a bit of the same thought I had. I've got a MSI Neo Platun (albeit not the same model, as I needed AGP for my gfx card, so the Neo Platnum 2).

In the case of my motherboard, the fan does seem to be thermally controlled. Also Asus comes with software (and there might be options in the BIOS, don't remember) which could give some relief (aka setting a higher thermal tollerance). I don't think I've ever seen mine go over 5k rpm, and seems to gravitate closer to 3,700 to 4,000 rpm, when I've checked

However, depending on how hot your computer is running, if you can add a well placed case fan that can drop case temp a fair amount, the on-board thermal sensors might detect that the northbridge fan doesn't have to run so hot. If your case allows, a nice 120 mm fan, which is well suited (to the assisting the airflow in your comp, based on how your other fans are situated) might help a fair amount. Large fans such as this, if you have room to place them, can get a lot of air flow, without the higher RPM, due to the overall size of the thing...

Perhaps if there are a few dif places you can put this, without unwanted obstruction, some thermal measurements (if you have something to conduct these with) on each placement will help you determine the most effective place to put it for overall case temp reduction...
 
Son Goku said:
In the case of my motherboard, the fan does seem to be thermally controlled. Also Asus comes with software (and there might be options in the BIOS, don't remember) which could give some relief (aka setting a higher thermal tollerance). I don't think I've ever seen mine go over 5k rpm, and seems to gravitate closer to 3,700 to 4,000 rpm, when I've checked

According to sh!tty speedfan, my NB temp is only 17C and reports the same rpm as the BIOS. I'll need to check out those speed controllers - I'm not into cutting wires and stuff. thanks.
 
ming said:
According to sh!tty speedfan, my NB temp is only 17C and reports the same rpm as the BIOS....

this will likely be plain WRONG..... so ignore that and do the finger test (blister = too hot!) Likely passive cooling or general case cooling can take care - I reckon they put those flashy tiny whiny fans on to make it look good for the ignorant.... plus it is like their insurance for when the mobo gets OC'd... But we dod not do that, do we? :devious:
 
:laugh: I can OC without the fan going that hot. A case that allows me to plop a nice bit 120 mm fan in front to suck some air in really helps. When that thing died, my case temps climbed about 7 or 8 degrees C.

The trick however, is getting the fans coordinated so they're not fighting each other/reducing each other's effectivness, which without seeing how it's all setup is kinda hard to advise.

In some cases, they do help such as, well on my old mobo when the northbridge fan stopped working, onboard video on the nForce chipset was fubar. Unfortunately, it had issues where sometimes it would lose AGP on boot, and quickly setting it to use the onboard (which it would boot with) and back again seemed to be the only way to jossle the thing into finding the AGP card again. On the Asus board which I had previously, it at least wasn't noiser then the other stuff in my comp, albeit it didn't last either...
 
So were you guys scared by a pair of wire cutters and a roll of tape when you were younger?
 
^ HA!

I just opend a PC/PSU and replaced a locked up fan in it with crimp on fittings. The difference between the stuff you are thinkig about and our stuff is $$$$ and fragility. Hell, I stepped on a K6-2 that is still in service, it bent pins. Would I do that again, with a new CPU? Hell NO!
 
I design million dollar power systems for $100 million dollar airplanes and do the same things on those I recommended here.

It's all in knowing what works and what doesn't. Courage mates.
V=IR and RPM ~ (V- BACKemf) no matter what the cost of the hardware.
 

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Also Hi EP and people. I found this place again while looking through a oooollllllldddd backup. I have filled over 10TB and was looking at my collection of antiques. Any bids on the 500Mhz Win 95 fix?
Any of the SP crew still out there?
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Just did some crude math and I apparently joined almost 18yrs ago, how is that possible???
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