Having a max of 244F. Thanks for the tip on the springs :bigtu:

I vaguely recall a linustechtips youtube video explaining reasons to change or why he was changing his out. Filter would be a nice touch. :likecat:

The NB image is just a random one from the internets, best one I could find without being at home.

Place a cover over the enclosure to prevent it from becoming filled with cat hair and penis-shaped confetti.

I already have a 480GB SSD: which sped up the whole thing massively. Also installed Windows 10 when putting the SSD in the thing.

As for the Rift / GFX: I initally was thinking of buying a R9 390 / GeForce GTX 9xx series GPU and a Rift as soon as it launched, but when I saw the price of the Rift I did not feel the urge anymore. I will wait a little longer to see what the price of the VR headsets will do. So now I am planning to wait for Pascal / Arctic Island GPUs with HBM2 memory. The age of 28nm GPUs is almost over: I do not want to spend my money on a 28nm GPU now. By then I think it would also be nice to put a Skylake CPU in there with 16GB DDR4. The PSU is very old (8 years I think), but still works fine. Capacity (620W) is more than plenty, the OEM is AcBel and it is built well. All capacitors looked fine a few months ago, the thing never saw a lot of hours and/or dust so it should be good for another few years.

Getting to the northbridge required the motherboard coming out, since the backing was just all solid aluminum. :hatecat:

Grabbed a beer and got to work!

The plastic tabs were a bit of a pain, tweezers helped a lot. Once it looked like I had both flaps in I just tapped it with the handle of my phillips and out they went. Was very careful setting it back on the chipset

Interesting choice for oem thermals. Northbridge had a square thermal grease pad where as the southbridge was a thermal paper pad sticker thing that I scratched off.

Played some farcry 4 while listing to pandora to just test the waters and see how high I could get it with daily tasks. So far it's maxed out at 188F. Writing this now it's down to 154F. :dunno:

Before I do another Prime95 run I'm just going to play some games for now and enjoy it while watching temps :bigtu:

188 still seems hot. But i wouldn't trust some of those probes. Sometimes they're known to be inaccurate.

10 minutes into Prime and i'm cool as a cucumber.


https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...ine=1453512985

Bought a laptop in 2008 in the days leading up to deployment.

Used laptop during deployment, it was a rockstar.

Used laptop after deployment for 6 years, it was a rockstar. Pulled the panels off every other year or so to blow dust out of the fans. Programs started to slow down eventually, and so did a format + clean install of windows.

One day I started noticing lots of graphical microfreezes in a game that shouldn't have been causing microfreezes. Actually, a lot of the processing power/performance had degraded noticeably since the early days. While deployed, I would rock WoW at full resolution and the computer wouldn't blink. Now the fans seemed to always be maxed out and it still was having issues.

Performed a pretty solid dis-assembly, removed some thermal paste on the heatsinks / heat pipe. At one place there was a thick thermal conductive pad, removed that. Filled in with new quality thermal paste everywhere, including some IC Diamond-24 where I removed the thick thermal pad, put it all back together.

Laptop is a rockstar again. I could probably drop in a SSD in the empty drive bay and make it even more of a rockstar. Regardless, it's a rockstar.

Moral of the story - thermal compound gets old, and then your shit runs like shit. Freshen it up and it'll run like new again.

Now i'm getting a "memory management" BSOD...

Ugggh, 1 week until a lan party at my house too.

I'd get those errors when I'd try and clock shitty cheap memory.

I also installed a too new AMD processor in an old as dirt m2n-sli deluxe and it didn't have proper bios configs to know how to handle the new stuff, even updated all the way.

Usb keyboard wouldn't work in bios, and it would apply batshit crazy timings and speeds to ram. Worked fine when configured proper, if you could find a ps/2 keyboard. Besides it trying to boot at the lowest multiplier, like 900mhz. It would boot and eventually scramble the OS on disk even.

Either that or your northbridge really is on fire?

AMD is notorious for usb shit not working at startup.

Doing this.
Not sure what all of this means, but the number of errors can't be good.
I have some pretty high quality ram, I'm shocked it's going bad. It never even got hot.

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...ine=1453676758

Are you sure you are running them at their rated spec?

They're in auto.
But they run slower than their spec.

You can try lowering the density to see if the controller is going out, or you can try removing sticks to see if they are bad, same testing either way.

I had a work PC that wouldn't run 2100mhz, but would run 1800 fine. If I dropped down to 3 channels it would run 2100mhz just fine. Spec for the memory controller was only like 1300 IIRC, so it just wasn't up to addressing so much memory at that overclocked speed.

Donno, just stuff to test.

It's 1600mhz ram running at 1333mhz. In Auto...

I don't really have time to play with it. I just got some new sticks. Paid $20 more for it today than i did 4 years ago. If this doesn't fix it, i guess it's time for a new motherboard CPU and ram.

Playing some games over the weekend, my northbridge max temp was 208F. Idles around 150s.

I haven't touched it to see if this is true. When looking at where the chip touches the heatsink when I applied the new thermal paste. It'd right in the middle of where it says gigabyte across. And this is just a big T with the top facing out. I wouldn't be surprised if the middle section is taking in most of the heat and the sides are cool.

Put a fan on it.

My buddy at work gave me a corsair 120mm case fan today... gud nuff' ?

Idk where to mount it, maybe zip it up to the hd cage. It'll be pushing air towards the back 'above' the video card. Right in the path of the cpu-ish area and northbridge.

I was thinking more along the lines of a noctua 40 or 60mm fan rigged on top of the northbridge heatsink :dunno:

Yes, just superglue it.

Just did this shit. So far i like the performance boost.