SPCR

Hi,

I bought a geforce4 TI4600 from Gainward a few month ago and I would like to make it a little bit more silent. I already considered two solutions but they seem impossible in my case :

• Zalman ZM80-HP, but there is not enough room above the agp slot as I'm using a dual athlon (A7M266)
• Custom heatsink with a panaflo at 7 or 5 V, but that would use too many of my 5 PCI slots (i'd like to fit an SCSI board for my Ultraplex 40, an ethernet card and an USB card (as USB is not working on the A7M266)

So I think serious underclocking is the only way to go. I don't care about 3D performance as the reason I bought this card was the two DVI ports that can do 1600x1200.

Here comes the questions :
How low can you underclock a Geforce4 ?
How low should I go so that the cooling device used is quiet and does not use more than 0/1/2 PCI slots ?
Will it have an effect on 2D performances ?

thanks,

Pierre-Yves

Why not just combine a Zalman 165 or 123 bracket, quiet 80mm fan with Fanmate1 fan speed controller and the Zalman ZM17 HS (or even the existing HS if it is big enough)? This approach will leave all your slots free and be much quieter.

That would be an acceptable solution indeed.
I already looked at the zalman ZM17 HS but I really do not want to glue it on my gpu.
I seriously doubt the stock heatsink would be enough (you can see it there http://www.gainwardusa.com/Products/Gai ... 20x246.jpg)
but maybe zalman + panaflo 7V + stock heatsink + underclocking to 250 MHz will do the trick.

I'll try this soon ...

thank you for the suggestion

Would be nice to come up with a spring to clamp a 1U copper cpu cooler to the GPU. Any ideas?

Underclocking any Nvidia card is really simple. A good set of instructions can be found here:

http://www.a1-electronics.co.uk/Graphic ... rce4.shtml

I think you can clock it down to something in the neighborhood of 265/575.

I doubt those settings would have any noticable effects for 2D work. For 2D work a Geforce2 has the same performance as geforce4, and it's specs are nowhere near that good.