Fan on the south bridge

[b1lk1]

Not so much that I had troubles with it, but when I had this board, I was overclocking the hell out of it and running a pair of 6800GS's and had horrible temps and stability issues until I made some major airflow changes and got the chipset temps to stay under the 50C mark. Plus, those fans are notorious for dying without much warning sometimes. DFI's support is terrible so I'd advise getting another cooler on your own. You don't need anything fancy. Something like this:

http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=18355&vpn=VC-RE&manufacture=Evercool

will work fine. Or there are the Vantec Iceberg series that will fit under the card and work very well too. I just would hate to see you run no fan and then have to wait weeks on end for any help at all from DFI. They want original receipts and they are VERY slow to respond to RMA requests.

 

[madmat]

With the Thermalright (not Thermaltake) the CPU fan would do the job of pushing air through the rad for the heatpipe if it's installed as per the pic I found on their site. But what the hey, buy something with another fan to fail again, it's no problem of mine, I'll quit trying to help.

 

[madstork91]

hmm... im not nocking the heatsink man... maybe a heatsink with a fan? If youve got anything along those lines that doesnt take up too much room im all ears.

 

[Kilamon]

I have the same board in two PCs. My wife's was making the same whirring noise but after powering up, I carefully stuck my finger in all the fans to track down the loud sounds of a fan going bad and found it to be the chipset fan. Now, according to DFI's forum, replacing that fan will not void the warranty. In fact, on their forum, they have a video on how to do it, http://www.dfi-street.com/forum/showthread.php?t=52950 so go have a look. As for me, I just used some canned air and cleaned it out and now it runs very smoothly.

 

[madmat]

Don't follow his instructions on the thermal paste. For exposed cores you always spread it to a thin layer, a blob won't always spread out 100% to full coverage.

The blob method is only for cores with an integrated heat spreader like a CPU. I was just sitting there going "WATAF? This guy's gotta be joking!" He used enough thermal paste to do that job 3 times over too.

 

[madstork91]

Thanks for the find kilmon!

Mat. Im probably going to try clean ing it one more time. After that I might very well be hitting up the egg to get a cooler fan for it. (Damn... i have to take my mobo bout to switch those out... )

 

[Jakal]

I replaced the stock NB heatsink on my DFI Infinity with the Evercool VC-RE previously mentioned. You won't hear it over the 7800s at all. It's an easy and simple fix to the problem. My fan wasn't failing, but I knew with overclocking the temps could have been an issue with the stock fan.

I think it was $5 even and shipping was $2 or so..

 

[madstork91]

ok so... my fan came in from the egg today. I will be performing my first official mod. Wish me luck and think happy thoughts for me.