Vrm cooling mod?

[DominicNikon]

Hello, i was just thinking can you mod like a 40mm fan onto a passive motherboard vrm heatsink for overclocking use to provide airflow over the passive heatsink while inside a case? 

[DildorTheDecent]

18 minutes ago, DominicNikon said:

Hello, i was just thinking can you mod like a 40mm fan onto a passive motherboard vrm heatsink for overclocking use to provide airflow over the passive heatsink while inside a case? 

Yes. It works best with finned/proper heat sinks + bigger fans as they provide more airflow and aren't as loud as the 40mm jet engines.

[kkpatel87]

27 minutes ago, DominicNikon said:

Hello, i was just thinking can you mod like a 40mm fan onto a passive motherboard vrm heatsink for overclocking use to provide airflow over the passive heatsink while inside a case? 

Regardless of the practicality, you can certainly create a bracket that would hold the fan and plug into a 5V hot bus or even a standard fan header.

[thrasher_565]

there are realty quiet 50mm fans but they come at a cost...

[Mick Naughty]

My mobo actually came with a little bracket for such a use. No fan I don’t think but I had one anyway. 
I’m sure my airflow is enough compared to having to hear the hum of that thing. 

[RobV1306]

I'll echo what everyone else has said in this thread... You can do it, but whether you need to do it is another thing.

 

Perhaps try taking a temp reading from the VRMs before you go to the expense/trouble of modding your case to actively cool them. There are a whole heap of different cheap ways you can measure their temps and you may find you simply don't need to cool them.

[randomhkkid]

I actually did this on a laptop, not quite the same use case but it shows that VRMs can be a limiting factor.

 

In my case the VRM overheating was holding back my CPU and GPU clocks. Padding the VRM circuitry and sinking it to the metal bottom of the laptop saw my clocks more than double on the GPU and gained me almost 1GHz under load on the CPU.