Maximum PC

Has anyone taken one of these things and added a fan or changed out the heatsink on the northbridge on this motherboard > I've got it running a Q9400 and 4 2Gb sticks of Corsair PC2-6400 DDR2 RAM stock clocks for now and the NB gets quite hot to the touch.....need to cool it down before I head into overclocking....

Core 2 775 NBs always got crazy-hot because of how fast their external memory controllers were (for the time of course). Does the motherboard report NB temps? If so what are they under a memory-heavy load (Prime95 Blend test is ideal for stressing the NB to the max)?

You could go with something substantial like a Thermalright HR-05 or variant with a fan. They work pretty darn well. However, it likely won't make much of a difference for the regular overclocker. NB's just run hot by nature.

Just the NB heatsink get's royally toasty, I"d love to cool it down a bit with some sort of forced air solution, guess I should at least supply some specs other than the motherboard....

Asus P5N-E SLI
Intel C2Q Q9400 Processor 2.66Ghz quad core
4X2Gb DDR2 800 PC2 6400 RAM
Dual 8600 GTS 256Mb video cards (soon to upgraded....)
5 HDDs 2 SATA and 3 IDE
1 IDE DVD burner (dying but to be replaced soon)
1 SATA DVD burner attached outside the case so I have something that works until i get busy with a screwdriver
PC Power & Cooling Silencer 750 Red power supply
Housed in an InWin Q500 24 inch full tower case.

Just needs more cooling especially for said NB.....the proc stays cool under load as does the video cards. Just any useful help would be appreciated.

nbrowser

Fixed the issue, put a 40mm GPU fan directly onto the NB heatsink....and transplanted the entire system into a HAF 932 case....all temps have dropped like stones