watercooling a asus a8n32 sli deluxe???

[jcrsantiago]

The asus a8nsli deluxe motherboard already had heatpipes, is it worth water cooling the bridge, or should i got straight to the cpu only?

 

[GreenJelly]

Im not certain about this board, but it is always a good idea to watercool the chipsets, if your not woried about the cost of the blocks. The board has a good design for watercooling, though I dont beleive their is a bolt on cooler for the voltage regulators. Do you have fans that will blow air across the motherboard? If so then it MAY provide enough cooling for water... By placing fins on Voltage Regulator near the CPU this motherboard draws the air from the CPU based fan.

The issue isnt black and white, because you dont know what is going to be the bottle neck. There is also no definitive testing available for these applications. Remember we are watercooling, something the chip manufacturers dont test or build these machines for. Our temps are lower and our ability to push things are much higher.

If you have an unlocked multiplier, then the solution is easy... dont worry about it... just keep the FSB down and keep pumping up the Multiplier. Then adjust it with the FSB to the right level.

I also dont know if any of these parts have temp sensors in them. If they do then you can monitor the temps using Motherboard Monitor.

You can just try to overclock it and see how far you get. This is what most people do. If you want the absolute best solutions then...

Remove the heat sinks, buy some flat temp readers, and some artic silver. Place the temp readers near the chips (look on the web on how to do this) replace the heat sinks and then monitor the resistance that comes from these sensors. If they get hot under load, then you should buy watercoolers. You could even buy a nifty temp/fan controller for the front, and plug these in. Could provide valuable data in the future even when you watercool.

Or simply buy waterblocks and install them. It all depends on what you consider to be a cost/time vrs risk solution. You should contact frozenCPU with the distance of the pins, and see if they have something available.

The cost of the waterblocks might excede the price of the Motherboard ($179 on NewEgg).

Keep this in mind. In my 20 years of working with x86 processors, I have never had a CPU go bad. However, I have had a number of motherboards hit the waste bin.