1 March 2007, 21:06 in

Swiftech MCX159-Cu chipset heatsink & fan

The northbridge fan on the motherboard of my dad’s video editing PC recently died. The PC is a AMD Athlon 64 3800+ socket 939, with 2GB Corsair RAM, an ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe motherboard, Lian Li PC70B tower case, NVidia 6600 graphics, and four hard disks. As usual when something goes wrong with a family PC, it’s my job to fix it.

Here is a shot of the inside of the PC. Unfortunately due to problems with my camera this is the only photo that came out.

Inside of dad's video editing PC (Feb 2007)

I ordered a Swiftech MCX159-Cu chipset heatsink and fan from PC Case Gear as a replacement for the broken factory cooler. For a chipset cooler, this thing is a real beast, with a thick copper base and tall cooling fins. It came with mounting brackets for both AMD and Intel platforms, and some thermal paste.

Swiftech MCX159-Cu

Mounting the Swiftech cooler on an AMD motherboard involves accessing the back of the motherboard, meaning the motherboard had to be removed from the case. We soon realised that the Swiftech was too tall and clashed with the Zalman VF700-Cu cooler on the graphics card! Fortunately dad has a well equipped workshop so he shortened the cooling fins down to reduce the height of the heatsink.

Other than that the install was uneventful. After getting everything back together the computer booted first time and all was fine. The Swiftech is a great little chipset cooler and fairly quiet too. Just be careful that you have enough clearance to mount it!

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