n4 sli-dr cooling.. chipset, etc (w/ 7900 gtx)

[NiCu]

Greetings all..

 

After reading close to 50 threads on the topic, I went ahead and ditched the stock chipset cooling on my dfi nf4 sli-dr. I'm posting this just to get certain key words in the same thread for future posters to find. This whole experiment in cooling enhancement was caused by the "sound of impending doom" the little stock fan had taken to creating in the last couple of weeks.

 

I installed the Thermaltake Extreme Spirit II chipset cooler in place of the stock jet-engine sounding thing that so many people seem to dislike. After reading a lot of threads, I didn't expect it to fit with my long graphics card (a BFG 7900 gtx), but I did find a bunch of threads that lead me to believe it could fit.. that was so untrue.

 

The moral of the story with the neat looking extreme spirit 2 and a extra long double wide vga card is I had to engage sli mode and put the graphics card in the 2nd PCI-e/sli slot. In the long run, this worked out great as it put the heat source of the GPU further away from the cpu as well as increased the air flow to said cpu's cooler (still stock).

 

I dropped about 9 degrees C on this chipset and even dropped 2 on the cpu (under load - distributed.net's rc5/ogr cracking software pegging both cores at 100%) with no noticeable performance hit on the graphics by using the 2nd slot.