Hi, i have this wierd clicking sound coming from my main computer, i opened the computer up, and it seems to be the fan on the southbridge, i was thinking it was power supply, but i thought, nah it couldent of been that power supply, so i had a closer look at the southbridge fan, and it seems to be that. well i dont know if its the northbridge of southbridge, i get them 2 mixed up, but dont most amd motherboards not have a northbridge or somthing? anyway, what could be causing this clicking in the fan? what should i do?
how fast is the clicking, if its very fast the fan is probably got knackered bearings or its catching on something as its turning
Well, you could stop the fan and see if the clicking stops---and I mean temporarily by pressing down on the center (the technical name escapes me). If it doesn't, then it's something else. If it is, then you may just need to dust it off, or replace it. As far as the Northbridge/Southbridge goes, the nForce 3 and nForce 4 (except for the nForce4 SLI x16 and nF4 400 series which goes back to the northbridge/southbridge 2 chip design) operates like this. A few SiS chipsets also use a single-chip solution as well, but most use a Northbridge/Southbridge design. The Northbridge is the major chip located close to the CPU, and generally has a heatsink or heatsink/fan combination for cooling. The Southbridge tends to be behind the PCI slots and may or may not have a passive heatsink---usually it does not. The nForce 3/4 chipsets are pretty much a southbridge with AGP or PCIe tacked on. The Athlon64 family has the memory controller on-die, but other designs---including the older AthlonXP and previous AMD processors do not. The memory controller in these 'traditional' designs is part of the northbridge, along with the graphics link and any integrated graphics that may be part of the chipset pairing.
Yeah Big B has summed it up nicely. The Northbridge controls the flow of data between the CPU, Memory and Graphics card. The Southbridge controls the flow of data between the PCI slots, IDE interfaces, USB, Serial, PS/2 etc.
thanks, you've all helped me alot Nothing is catching on the fan, as the fan on the southbridge has metal casing around it, its deffenitly the southbridge fan, the bearings have mucked up, i stuck a thin tie wrap through one of the holes for a second and stopped the fan for a second, and that told me that its the southbridge fan.
