BC said:
Dear Bobius and Paul,
I did notice perhaps a year ago that Maximum PC mounted the A8N-SLI
premium "upside down" in one of their custom builds, and, I never heard
of any issues that resulted from that--they can be pretty harsh, so I
assume they would have made some mention of it had there been a problem
(and I apologize if they did, and I did not read or hear about it....)
<<snip>>
There have been complaints from people who have inverted A8N-SLI
Premium. For some reason, not everyone has the same results. This
could be due to differences in the fabrication of the heatpipe
(more or less working fluid, wrong internal pressure etc). Some
companies have the devil of a time making consistent heatpipes -
for example, I've heard of early processor coolers, where the
pipes weren't even operational (they were as effective as a piece
of copper pipe). Without a study of a large batch of motherboards,
it is difficult to say how much unit to unit variation there is
in the "goodness" of Asus heatpipes. It is even possible the
heatpipes are not made in house, and for the various Asus products,
they simply contract to different suppliers for the piece part.
In any case, I'd sooner suggest to people, they go to the Asus Estore
and buy the fittings for the Deluxe, and remove the heatpipe before
installing the motherboard inverted. Either that, or do a test
fitting, do a bit of gaming on the thing, and measure the chipset
temperature and see where the surface temp on the block ends up.
If the temp really does hit 75C, chances are the silicon itself is
at 100C+. Here is a sample posting on the topic:
http://discuss.extremetech.com/forums/786232016/PrintPost.aspx
"I noticed that you were using the ASUS motherboard with the
fanless heat-pipe cooling solution for the chipset and
recommended the Lian-Li case that has an inverted motherboard.
I recently upgraded to an ASUS A8N-SLI Premium motherboard
with the fanless heatpipe and had installed it into a Silverstone
case with the same inverted motherboard arrangement.
What I found was that the chipset ran extremely hot when
inverted like this. I measured the top of the heat block on the
chipset at 75C when the motherboard was in the inverted position
- chipset was higher than the cooling fins near the CPU. When I
flipped the case over the heat block on the chipset only reached
50C. This was with the computer idling...
I didn't like running the chipset at 75C+ so I moved to an Antec
P180 case.
I was wondering what your thoughts were on this. ASUS doesn't
state anywhere that I could see that the motherboard needed to
be oriented in any specifc manner..."
If people are having trouble keeping a heatpipe video card stable
in the upright position, the performance of the heatpipe would
have to be damn good, for there to be no measurable change when
it is inverted. The right answer is probably water blocks, plus
enough air cooling to keep disk drives, chipsets, Vcore conversion
all cooled. There are a few video cards being delivered, that
already come with a water block installed, so you don't have to
throw away an original cooling solution and fit your own water
block. With water cooling, and the radiator placed outside the case,
a major amount of internal case heating is avoided.
HTH,
Paul