Introduction

Today I'll be looking at the Swiftech MCX159-A Extreme Duty Chipset Cooler for AMD platforms. This kit is an upgraded heatsink and fan combination designed to keep the North Bridge cool. The North Bridge is the main link between the CPU and the RAM inside your box, so it has a lot of traffic going across it. Every motherboard comes with at least a passive cooler to help it stay steady, and some of the better motherboards even install a fan on it. Installing a heavy-duty cooler on the North Bridge ensures that the chipset keeps steady, even when pushing the motherboard past specs. 

Overview

The MCX is an impressive piece compared with the stock cooler. The base is a solid hunk of copper and has a good heft to it. There is no doubting the mass here, as it easily outweighs two other active coolers in my possession. The copper base is home to 96 vertical rods that penetrate the copper base. 

The vertical rods look a lot like machine screws with the heads cut off, and at first I thought this was a little strange.  As I thought about it though, I realized that the threading on the rods is an excellent way to increase the surface area for heat dissipation.  With 96-1" screws, you get a lot of linear inches of surface area (someone care to calculate the total surface area?).  The rods are topped by a tall fan with big, broad blades. The kit includes the cooler, mounting hardware, instructions, thermal paste, and the fan.

Installation

CrazyPC sent me three different North Bridge Coolers to test. (Thanks, guys!) Although the other two kits were very nice (and will be looked at separately), I chose to install the Swiftech unit on my main machine, the Bling Box. The timing was perfect, as I was upgrading the Bling Box's motherboard/RAM/Processor. The North Bridge coolers need to be installed with the motherboard out of the case. This is so that you can access the bottom of the motherboard, essential to installing the cooler.

The North Bridge in this case is a KT600 chipset employed on an ECS Motherboard. The stock heat sink was the garden variety passive gold-anodized aluminum finned plate.

With the motherboard brand new out of the box, I went to work removing the stock heat sink. If there is an easy way to do this, I am not aware of it. I was really nervous trying to pry the OEM sink off the chipset, as it was held on by what appeared to be thermal tape. You could only twist it so far, and I had to be patient.  I was worried about damaging the chipset, but the sink finally came off clean with a little gentle persuasion. I once ripped the core out of a processor trying to get  a heat sink off that had been epoxied onto the chip, so I wasn't keen on ruing a brand new motherboard. Whew! 

Once I got the old sink off, I began the installation by applying a small dab of thermal compound (included) onto the chip.

Then I spread it around a little bit with my finger.  You don't want excess on the chip, just enough to form a thin barrier between the base of the cooler and chip.  This fills in the natural voids in the machined base of the cooler.  I have to say that the bottom of this cooler was very flat, with barely detectable machining grooves in the bottom.  You can also lap the surfaces, but I didn't find it necessary on this application.

The next step was to insert the long retention screws up from the bottom of the motherboard.  Swiftech includes all the fiber washers you need to make sure that the screws don't contact any electrical sources on the motherboard.

Once the support rods were in place, I placed the cooler onto the chipset.  The screw holes lined up perfectly.  Rather than just bolting it on, the kit includes a sophisticated retention assembly that puts gentle spring pressure on the cooler to keep point stresses on the motherboard down.  Once it was tightened down, I was perfectly satisfied that it was on securely.  High marks for the mounting kit. I plugged in the fan to a free motherboard header (the ECS provides a dedicated fan header for the North Bridge) and completed the motherboard installation.  This cooler dwarfs the stock CPU cooler!  I had what I thought was a nice CPU cooler to go with it, but it turned out to be less than satisfactory, so for now, the OEM unit gets the nod.

Conclusion

This case is not destined to be overclocked to any great extent, so the MCX159-A is probably a little bit overkill for this application.  Even so, I have not experienced any faults that could be traced back to the memory controller, so I consider it good insurance.  Although there is a lot of real science that goes into making a good heat sink, certain things always net better performance.  Large amounts of copper tightly bonded to large surface area radiators, combined with a silent fan that moves good air, equals good performance. Installation was straightforward, with complete instructions that were easy to follow.  Should I decide to push this motherboard, I feel certain that Northbridge thermal stability will not be an issue.

Pros

• Quality Construction

• True massive copper baseplate

• Good instructions

• Excellent retention mechanism

Cons

• Overkill on non-overclocked machine