Overclocking. Nowadays, everybody and their grandmother are overclocking their machines to squeeze out every ounce of performance they can possibly get. “Eh, whatcha say sonny? I can’t hear ya over this dang-nab Delta!” What was once a practice in the black arts, passed among fellow cult members, is now obtainable to just about anyone. Manufacturers have brought about this rapid expansion by not only giving the users easy access to such board-level functionalities like CPU and memory buses, but also by beefing up the products designed to keep these components running cool.

When overclocking, one has to raise the voltage for the CPU itself, but also the mainboard chipset . Along with this increase in both speed and voltage comes the much hated byproduct, heat. To combat this added heat, you’ll often see an array of heatsinks ranging from your standard air cooling to H2O and even peltiers. All of these products are designed to help keep the CPU’s temperatures in check to ensure proper operation. But what about the lonely northbridge chip and to a further extent, the MOSFET chips which regulate power to the CPU and the rest of the system? Sure, the CPU gets the chance to get cozy with a big, all copper cooling beauty, but the other components are left to fend for themselves to keep cool from the small trickle of air that passes over them.

Nowadays, the average mainboard chipset is nearly as complicated and compact as the CPU’s they’re designed to interact with. Including such onboard functionalities like sound, networking, and in some cases even video, these little darlings can really put out a considerable amount of heat for their size. You can have your CPU running at a cool 30 degrees for days on end and still end up with an unstable system if the northbridge is running too hot. Being that the northbridge is basically the communication gateway between the upper segment of the machine, i.e. CPU and memory, and the rest of the system, i.e. PCI Bus, IDE, COM ports, etc., it becomes rather important that it’s running as smoothly as possible. Some manufacturers are combating this heat by placing larger heatsinks on the northbridge chip, but quite often, these are passive implementations, meaning there’s no fan attached. Heat is basically dissipated solely by airflow through the computer, or often times by the airflow generated by the CPU fan.

Today we’ll be looking at the Microcool Northpole chipset cooler. Designed with hardcore users in mind, this package is aimed at keeping both the northbridge as well as the MOSFET chips running cooler. We’ll take a look and see what kind of temperature savings can be achieved compared to stock cooling as well as see if it helps us to knock out a few more MHz on the old FSB.