I know that a heatsink is needed on the northbridge, but is it really
neccessary to have a fan on it also? I've seen many motherboards with and
without a fan on the northbridge heatsink.
It depends. Some northbridge chips produce more heat than others (just like
some cpus produce more heat than others). Also some MB makers use bigger
heatsinks in place of a small heat sink + fan. Personally I tend to choose
motherboards without a NB fan if all other considerations are equal. If
it's for my own use and I get a MB with a NB fan I normally replace the
heatsink with a larger one and secure it with a good thermal adhesive such
as AS (for new boards) or superglue for used boards. Actually SuperGlue is
surprisingly effective thermally but I worry a bit about it eating the
plastic packaging. I don't worry about the noise but failures are for
small/cheap/thin fans are common and I think the symptoms of a NB fan
failure (random memory corruption, maybe just on warm days) would be easy to
miss so I prefer to eliminate that possibility when the system is new and
I'm still thinking about it.
