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Maximus VII Hero - PCH watercooling needed ?

Highlanderix
Level 7
Hello,

I have a Maximus VII Hero motherboard with a G3258 running at stock, 16Gb of Corsair Vengeance RAM 1600C9 and my old 8800 GTS 512Mb used for MadVR only, I'm not playing games. Everything is installed in my old Antec 1200 (4 intake 120mm fans + 2 more 120mm fans and the 240mm at the top).

I want to use my watercooling setup I had set up back in the the days when I had a Q9500 with a P5Q-Pro and to overclock the CPU to around 4.2GHz-4.5GHz. My watercooling setup includes a Hardware Labs Black Ice GTX 480 Radiator mounted (externally) on the back of the case with 6 120mm fans attached to it, a Laing DDC-1T pump (two actually), a Nexxxos XP High Flow CPU waterblock, a waterblock from EK for the GPU and a Enzotech SNBW REV.A waterblock which I was using on the P45 chipset.

I'm not really sure if it's worthed to install the Enzotech waterblock on the PCH ? Could the PCH overheat at all with its stock cooler and in which circumstances ? Since there is no PCH temp sensor on the Maximus VII Hero (why is that), I need a little help to decide what's best.

Thanks !
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8 REPLIES 8

Highlanderix
Level 7
P.S.: I just found that the Z97 has a TDP of 4.1W which couldn't generate much heat, right ? So why bother making PCH waterblocks like this one : http://www.ekwb.com/shop/ek-sb-asus-m6g-nickel.html

Highlanderix wrote:
So why bother making PCH waterblocks like this one : http://www.ekwb.com/shop/ek-sb-asus-m6g-nickel.html



It's mainly for looks..... Most motherboards do not require any liquid cooling for their chipset or VRM's... Note that this is on the proviso that there is adequate airflow over those areas of the board.

Ok, thanks. Yes the case is well ventilated. Like I said, there is plenty of fans so temps are not really a issue. I have the waterblock, so I was thinking why not use it but I think that I'll keep only the CPU and GPU watercooled for now.

Thanks again

twisted1
Level 12
The PCH runs really cool. What you might want to watercool is the VRM's on the board.

twisted1 wrote:
The PCH runs really cool. What you might want to watercool is the VRM's on the board.

What solution you suggest for that?

randyenergy wrote:
What solution you suggest for that?


A VRM/Mosfet waterblock, I don't know if there are any for the hero though.

VRM heat isn't really a problem on most regular motherboards. On X79 and probably X99 however the VRM's run really hot. A SB-E cpu clocked a @5Ghz easily draws +400W of power under full load so those VRM's get really hot. And since X79 boards have DIMM slots on both sides of the CPU all of the VRM's are usually situated directly above the cpu, sitting very close together. I've had cpu throttling due to VRM's running to hot on my RIVE before I got waterblocks for it.

MatsGlobetrotte
Level 10
On my maximus vi formula the PCH cooler seems to get quite hot, at normal clockspeeds it was fingerwarm but when i do OC with watercooling on vrm and cpu it effectively becomes the hottest part of the system. Meanwhile i have had crashes which showed up not related to memory or cpu clock speeds but rather clock timing issues that i suspects being due to timing with the PCH. I had taken off my PCH cooler but realized i could not get my system back to the same scores overall even in XTU. Meaning i in most cases could not even use the settings at all without getting crashes. I have not 100 % confirmed this was the issue yet but it is by far the most likely source.
It started with a VIC-20... and now it is. Maximus Formula VI Intel 4770K 4.6GHz ASUS GTX780Ti 3GB Corsair Platinum Dominator 16GB 2400MHz Raid Express 240GB Samsung EVO 512 GB SSD Corsair 900D EK watercooling Corsair RM1000 ASUS PB278Q



MatsGlobetrotter wrote:
On my maximus vi formula the PCH cooler seems to get quite hot, at normal clockspeeds it was fingerwarm but when i do OC with watercooling on vrm and cpu it effectively becomes the hottest part of the system. Meanwhile i have had crashes which showed up not related to memory or cpu clock speeds but rather clock timing issues that i suspects being due to timing with the PCH. I had taken off my PCH cooler but realized i could not get my system back to the same scores overall even in XTU. Meaning i in most cases could not even use the settings at all without getting crashes. I have not 100 % confirmed this was the issue yet but it is by far the most likely source.


Is it that bad? Might be a good idea to get a real VRM block for the board. They're way better. My rangers VRM heat sink doesn't get very hot, I've only tried it with a pentium AE though and I guess that doesn't draw that much power.

Since I got waterblocks on my RIVE the block backplate doesn't get very hot at all. With the stock cooling you could just touch it for like 1sec because it was so hot.

For XTU you only need high OC for the first 3sec of the bench, that's when the score is calculated. After that you can lower the oc/vcore 🙂