How To: Fabricate Your Own Northbridge Dry Ice Container
04.01.08 - 03:30pm
When benching there are two things you can adjust, voltages and temperatures. Increasing voltages will work to an extent but you will typically hit a wall at some point after which only dropping the temperatures will increase the frequency you can run your components at. Northbridges on Intel motherboards are very finicky chips, they will “wall” at the oddest frequencies, they will cold bug at seemingly random temperatures, but most of all they are the major bottleneck with current chips. To give you an example, my E8400 on my P35 will hit a solid 560+FSB but it walls at 540FSB on the X38. To counter-act this, I have fabricated a simple dry ice container in hopes of cracking 540FSB.
Materials
This container is about as simple as it gets. You will need 1 Intel 65nm box cooler to start. I specify this cooler as it has a solid copper core. If you don’t have one, ask your friends, neighbors, strangers, etc, everyone has one of these things sitting in the closet. In addition to this cooler, you’ll need roughly 5 inches of 1″ diameter copper pipe, some copper brazing rods, a torch, a hammer, thick gloves, and a wooden dowel or screw driver. That’s it, a few extra tools like a drill and grinder are helpful, but not necessary.
Directions
To start out, remove the fan from the heatsink. Next, remove the push-pins from the mount, I simply snapped them off as they are positively useless. With your heatsink bare, either toss it in the oven and bake it for 15 minutes at the highest temp possible, or blast it for a few minutes with your torch. You want to heat up aluminum, this made it far easier for me to pop the core out. Once the heatsink is nice and hot, carefully using the gloves, hammer, and dowel, pop the copper core out. I personally got mine jammed with about 3mm of the copper stuck in the aluminum and cut mine out, but if you are careful you can avoid this situation.
Place the copper core facedown on the ground and take your copper pipe and insert it into the top of the core. Lightly tamp it into place, I managed to ram my pipe about 5mm into the core, making a solid seal. Now heat up the core and pipe with your torch and braze it together. I personally piped some carbon dioxide into the pot to keep the inside from oxidizing, this isn’t necessary but it’s a nice touch. Once finished, let the copper cool and then begin cleaning up the oxidization. I used a wire-wheel on my angle-grinder, took about 30 seconds to strip all the oxidization off.
Mounting
I opted to use the stock steel mount with properly drilled holes for my motherboard. Home depot also carries 1″ diameter pipe insulation that will simply slide over the pot which would form a nice seal at the base of the mount. Be sure to properly insulate your motherboard, since the northbridge doesn’t dump a lot of heat you will need to be very careful. Also note, these chips will coldbug so take it easy on the dry ice, only a little bit would be necessary.
Conclusion
I wrote this article about a month ago but somehow forgot to publish. I had plans on using my E8400 to hit 600FSB but I have since sold that chip and my QX9650 walls at 474FSB no matter the board. This weekend I will be holding another Atlanta Overclockers meetup and hopefully this pot will see some use. I’ve been told on board/chip combos where the board is holding you back, dry icing the northbridge will yield 20 to 50FSB, enough to really unleash any hidden potential.
Cool, I ll try it this weekends.
Hi, I tried it last week. It’s not too difficult but look not so nice due my skill. Lol!