Introduction

I sold my good old NF7-S Rev 1.2, AMD Thoroughbred-B 1700+ and SLK800 and replaced them with a brand new NF7-S Rev 2.0, the miraculous AQXEA 0330 WPMW AMD Barton 2500+ and the SLK947. The first thing I did was to wet-sand the north bridge.

As you all know, the NVIDIA nForce2 is a very, very hot chipset. I can't even leave my finger on the south bridge for more than 6 seconds, let alone the north bridge. The early revisions of the nForce2 chipsets shared one common flaw - the north bridge chip's surface wasn't flat.

Because of that flaw, the north bridge's heat sink cannot actually make full contact with the north bridge. A large amount of thermal paste was required to "bridge the gap". The situation improved a lot with the introduction of the nForce2 Ultra 400 chipset but unfortunately, they still couldn't make them completely flat.

An imperfect contact surface is one of the best excuses to wet-sand your north bridge and that's exactly what I did. Believe it or not, the result was fantastic!

Frankly, I care more about how high I can push my motherboard's FSB than how fast I can clock my processor. Don't ask me why, I just love high FSB speeds! Getting low FSB speeds is the reason why I switched to ABIT NF7-S motherboards.