Northbridge on Mac Pro 1.1

[maxp]

Hi all,

I have a divided opinion from work colleagues about the location of the northbridge on our 1.1 mac pros.

Some say it is at the 'top' (nearest the disk drives), some say it is at the 'bottom' (nearest the ram).

Can anyone confirm 100% which one of these it is?

Thanks.

 

[Dark Dragoon]

Pretty certain it's the bottom one, which when installed is located inside/under the memory cage.

 

[4JNA]

it's the big one Jim...

with no documents to go on, i'd go with a comparison to similar peecee xeon boards.

from building servers for a long time, lots with that/similar chipset, the bigger heatsink will always be the northbridge. lots of similar Intel and Supermicro boards with this chipset don't even have a cooler on the southbridge, so probably just Apple being 'extra' careful and trying to make it run quiet. best of luck.

EDIT: to add, on top of being 100% sure based on sink size, i can also see the cable going under the edge of the sink that likely goes to a temp diode glued/stuck to the bottom of the sink. the PN and the Foxconn number don't bring up anything on google, but on my 1,1 there is a temp reading for Northbridge, and nothing for Southbridge. again just my 2 cents.

 

[666sheep]

OP, nothing has changed since this thread:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1126922/