So as many of you know, back in December I got a shiny new EVGA 780i Motherboard (which was later followed by a slew of other hardware, but that’s another story for another day). Anyway, over the course of these 2 months I have been battling with some pretty severe chipset temperature issues. The IDLE temp of the MCP (Southbridge) chipset was 62C! While this is “in spec” according to NVIDIA, to me this is completely unacceptable, especially when it was cranking up to 70C under load.

Now, I know what some of you might say. Did you try replacing the TIM? Did you follow [p]’s guide on the EVGA Forums? The answer to both of those questions is a yes, those temps I provided are AFTER doing the mentioned things, you don’t want to know what it was before the initial mod.

So I decided to get a Thermalright HR-05-SLI High Riser from FrozenCPU. That coupled with a little handy work modding the stock cooler and I should be all set. Here’s some pictures of the progress with an explanation of the steps (click the images to see larger pictures)

Ok, so step 1 was of course to pull the motherboard out of the case. As you can see here this is the motherboard with the stock cooler as it came from EVGA. The only mod is the 60mm fan on the NB Heatsink, to push more air (yes I know it’s an AMD Fan lol).

Here are a couple of shots of the Southbridge chipset after removing the stock cooler. As you can see it resides right under the Video card, so this thing getting hot does not spell good things for the video card temperatures, especially considering that I have an 8800GTX.

Here you can see the HR-05-SLI Mounted on the MCP. It is mounted on an angle because the way the mounting system works it cannot be mounted straight. This does not hinder the cooling performance whatsoever, and this proves that this product DOES fit on the 780i MCP (it does NOT fit on the northbridge because of the second NF200 chip). So now that this is mounted, how do we get the rest of the cooling system in place?

As you can see here, the stock cooling system is back on the Northbridge and the MOSFETS. The only thing missing is the heatpipes and the small block that sat on the MCP. I simply cut this section of the cooler off with a hacksaw and filled in the heatpipes with lead free solder to avoid any possible leakage of the heatpipe element.

Here are a couple of pictures after everything is back in the case, as you can see everything fits great, and even better, there is enough clearance to get a second video card in the bottom PCI-E slot. Tri-SLI however, is not possible when using this cooler on the MCP.

So now for the real good stuff, how does this all perform? Well I mentioned before that my temp ranged from 62-70C on the MCP with the stock setup. With the new setup the MCP temperature ranges from 41-46C. That’s a full 20C decrease in temperature which is great. As an added bonus, this also dropped my 8800GTX temperatures by almost a full 10C. So all in all I’d say this mod is MORE than worth the cost of the cooler plus the time it takes to perform the mod (about a half hour if you’re good at this stuff).

Anyway, enjoy and feel free to leave any feedback in the comments area or e-mail me :).