PCI North Bridge Cooler

This is my PCI North Bridge and Video Cooling Mod

Both the North-bridge and the top of the video card gets hot.  My x1950 ATI/Sapphire lacks a heat sink on top. This gets quite warm.  This card is most likely fried.  I'm deciding what to do for a replacement. I'm a little PISSED OFF that Sapphire was too cheap to put a heat-sink on top like everyone else.

update:12/25/2007 10:16 AM My x1950 is running on the secondary plug.  I played BF2 and 1/2 Life all night long.  Both the graphics card and chipset are ice cold!!

 More cooling power is better and I like building mods.

I'm proud of this mod and glad I got off my lazy ass and finished this.

 This is the filter side, facing the graphics card.

I've had to sand down the screw heads as they are too close to solder points sticking up from the graphics card.

I also filed down the solder points and added some electrical tape as well.

From now on, I'll build my "thin style".

No Lights, No LED's

Don't forget to put the heat shrink on FIRST, before you solder.

This time I'm using a 1/4" thick piece of clear polycarbonate. 

It is still wrapped in it's protective paper.

The filter will go on the bottom, keeping the fans intake clean.

I hate dirty fans.

The parts I've gathered are:

A salvaged PCI bracket from one of those cheesy slot coolers.  I tried modding these slot coolers and though it worked, I was not impressed.

a PCI bracket from an old ISA modem would work just as well. I salvage these, whenever I can.

a clear 80mm fan, filter and silencer.

Wood Screws and spacers (the spacers are required for this bracket since it is full width).

a 12 volt (disco) LED to illuminate the fan.

a Phoenix block to connect both the fan & LED to a single Molex connector. 

These cheesy little slot coolers (below) get dirty fast and have very limited cooling power.  At least I could salvage the bracket.

Here this project is setting next to an old ISA slot modem.

The PCI bracket from this old card could have been used as well.  The modem body just get trashed.

This helps set the scale to give the viewer the approximate size for the project.

The plastic will be trimmed by quite a bit, after the hole is bored.  The overall length is not too important except to make clearance for the memory slots.

Here is my "Large Diameter Hole Saw".

I can set this up to most any diameter I want. It's metric on one side and English on the other.

Here I've bored a hole in a sheet of plastic. You can see the scrap it leaves.  In essence, it's 2 adjustable knives with a small drill bit. It needs a small pilot hole to get started properly.

You have to be really careful chucking up the work piece.

Any power tool applied to an odd shaped work piece can take off spinning or fly off.  Try not to get hurt with tools.

Here is a photo of a cooler I made with perfboard and a 60mm fan, wrapped in stainless shim stock.

The PCI slot bracket was something I ripped off of a PCI graphics card.  It had 2 small angle mounts and it's screws.  perfboard is really easy to work with.   If you had to you could cut the large hole with most any tool including a hobby knife.  You can buy these at most case-mod sites but I made this, it's my case mod.  

It's an easy project to build. See how I did it here