How to cool motherboard VRMs?

[Jurrunio]

How do you cool them? In my chassis, the PSU compartment is at the top. since the cables are too short and it now sits outside the case, I have a big hole up there, enough for my new 140mm fan to lie up there and blow air towards the VRM heatsink.

 

How can you do that with modern chassis if it doesnt have air intake/exhuast on the top (I prefer intake, but whatever)? ATX and mATX cases typically have them, but tiny ITX cases doesnt always have them.

[porina]

Unless you're heavily overclocked, I wouldn't do anything special. General case airflow should be enough.

[RollinLower]

if you really are worried about VRM temps, which you generally shouldn't be unless you're going X299 and 7980XE , you could always watercool them. 

tough as stated above, usually the normal motherboard heatsink and case airflow are plenty.

[Jurrunio]

@porina @RollinLower So the majority of people dont have to worry about that? Never got a chance to try that out myself yet. My current chassis is so old, the only intake is on the side panel (which is removed to solve the PSU issue). This means my case has no airflow whatsoever.

[Hiitchy]

As crazy as it sounds, in one of my builds, I jerry rugged a hanging 120mm fan to blow on the heat sinks and the difference was 1-2 degrees Celsius probably because my cooling plan was inefficient.

[porina]

When I was trying to gently OC a 1700 on a B350-M mobo with no heatsinks on the VRM, using an IR camera they were only getting to around 80C under sustained load from memory. I can't remember the spec on them, but they're good for 100C+. This was open bench, so there was essentially no airflow, but conversely there would be no trapped hot air either as there might be in a bad case. If you don't overclock, and don't run loads continuously for hours or days, it isn't going to get close to a high enough temperature to worry about.

 

Even Skylake-X isn't that bad. For my non-AVX OC I've taken my 7800X to 4.9 GHz 1.4-ish volts and not had VRM overheating. Just the stock mobo cooling in an unremarkable tower case. I can't remember where I got to with full on FMA3 enabled Prime95 stable clocks, and even dabbled with AVX-512. Ok, it might be different if I had a HCC model, but I'd have a better mobo too, not the cheapest Asus I could find.

[Jurrunio]

5 minutes ago, porina said:

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Just want my mobo to last as long as possible. At the current price levels I wont upgrade my PC at all unless Haswell i7 gets cheap, which I doubt since it is the king of DDR3 gaming CPU atm. Z170 mobo using DDR3 is rare in my area, fyi

[porina]

2 minutes ago, Jurrunio said:

Just want my mobo to last as long as possible. At the current price levels I wont upgrade my PC at all unless Haswell i7 gets cheap, which I doubt since it is the king of DDR3 gaming CPU atm. Z170 mobo using DDR3 is rare in my area, fyi

Presuming you want to hold out as long as possible on DDR3 to save cost? Will be challenging to upgrade for sure.

 

In a generic sense, failure rates do go up with temperature. So a bit of extra cooling might reduce the risk a bit, but I'm still not sure it is worth it. It'll still be down to bad luck when it eventually fails.

[Jurrunio]

12 minutes ago, porina said:

Presuming you want to hold out as long as possible on DDR3 to save cost? Will be challenging to upgrade for sure.

 

In a generic sense, failure rates do go up with temperature. So a bit of extra cooling might reduce the risk a bit, but I'm still not sure it is worth it. It'll still be down to bad luck when it eventually fails.

Here 4790k and mobo bundle cost the same as 7700k and mobo bundle. 6700k bundle is actually cheaper. All because of RAM prices.

[aezakmi]

I added an aftermarket heatsink and 2 fans to my old AMD board but unless you're into extreme oc the stock mobo heatsink will suffice

 

if you put a fan on top set it as exhaust

[porina]

1 hour ago, Jurrunio said:

Here 4790k and mobo bundle cost the same as 7700k and mobo bundle. 6700k bundle is actually cheaper. All because of RAM prices.

Where is "here"? Haswell era kit is not cheap new as it is limited supply and hasn't been made for a while. Maybe keep an eye out on used market as people upgrade.

 

It's a bit of a gamble, I've been wondering if the Chinese X79 mobos you see on ebay, combined with a Xeon and ECC registered ram might be a value option. It wont be much of an upgrade from a 2600k as it is still Sandy/Ivy Bridge, but you could get more cores at the cost of some clock, and ECC registered ram is much cheaper than normal stuff as hardly anyone can use it.

[SimplyChunk]

54 minutes ago, porina said:

-snip-

 

It's a bit of a gamble, I've been wondering if the Chinese X79 mobos you see on ebay, combined with a Xeon and ECC registered ram might be a value option. It wont be much of an upgrade from a 2600k as it is still Sandy/Ivy Bridge, but you could get more cores at the cost of some clock, and ECC registered ram is much cheaper than normal stuff as hardly anyone can use it.

I asked about the chinese x79 mobos on here not a few weeks ago.  Have a dig in the CPU, Motherboards and RAM section and you should find the answers.

 

To OP:

 

I've been wondering about the same thing lately as when i upgrade to the be quiet! 360mm AIO i'll lose all airflow around my chip.  Being in a P3 case, with little to no flow, i was thinking maybe a small propitiatory 40mm fan on a couple of thick, bent wires, clipped onto the southbridge cooler with crocodile clips

[Jurrunio]

6 hours ago, porina said:

Where is "here"? Haswell era kit is not cheap new as it is limited supply and hasn't been made for a while. Maybe keep an eye out on used market as people upgrade.

 

It's a bit of a gamble, I've been wondering if the Chinese X79 mobos you see on ebay, combined with a Xeon and ECC registered ram might be a value option. It wont be much of an upgrade from a 2600k as it is still Sandy/Ivy Bridge, but you could get more cores at the cost of some clock, and ECC registered ram is much cheaper than normal stuff as hardly anyone can use it.

Hong Kong, to be exact. Sure I can buy X79 or even X58 stuff from mainland China, but I play games only so I dont need more cores. I do want more performance for each core, but sticking to DDR3 means Haswell is as far as I can go (Xeon E3s are also rare and expensive).

[rjbweb]

I have a R5 2400G on a Asus tuf B450M Mobo, I was unable to set on bios the graphics card on auto extreme or overclock in any way than normal auto because the graphics would throttle to 400mhz constantly making any game unplayable. Out of curiosity I placed a fan (very precariously with double sided sticky tape) blowing directly to the vrm and boom, put the settings to extreme on the bios and the graphics run at 1500mhz with no issues...  

 

I have a DEEPCOOL GAMMAXX GT BK cooler and my temps never go above 70 degrees Celsius  

[Jurrunio]

1 hour ago, rjbweb said:

I have a R5 2400G on a Asus tuf B450M Mobo, I was unable to set on bios the graphics card on auto extreme or overclock in any way than normal auto because the graphics would throttle to 400mhz constantly making any game unplayable. Out of curiosity I placed a fan (very precariously with double sided sticky tape) blowing directly to the vrm and boom, put the settings to extreme on the bios and the graphics run at 1500mhz with no issues...  

 

I have a DEEPCOOL GAMMAXX GT BK cooler and my temps never go above 70 degrees Celsius  

If it's the TUF Plus board, that's to be expected