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Radeon 8500DV AIW Cooling

Posted: Wed Jun 18, 2003 8:18 pm
by oogabooga
I was getting very annoyed with the dinky high-pitched fan on my Radeon8500 - it and my HD are the two biggest noisemakers in my box. So, I had bought a Zalman ZM17-CU cooler. I proceeded to remove my HSF on the Radeon (using the screwdriver trick - no freezing required!), and then had one last look at SPCR about the ZM17, where I found this article, which explains how the copper fins will mess up your TV signal!!

So, I was left with a Radeon 8500DV with some epoxy, the old whiny heatsink, and no solution :-(
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I figured that I might as well remove the epoxy with an exactoknife. This can be a long process, which I sped up with acetone - just put some on a Q-tip and rub carefully on the metal part of the chip (it shouldn't damage the plastic, but better safe than sorry). I didn't take a picture, but when you are done you should have a nice shiny GPU!

Then I took a leap of faith. I'd read somewhere here that a Zalman NB32J Northbridge HSF and a Panaflo fan could work in a pinch. So, I epoxied the NB32J to the Radeon, and placed a Panaflo fan directly infront of the mess (using MikeC's ghetto fan mount). The fan's currently at 12V - I'm going to see about going quieter. Here's the final card:
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And here's the whole product (kinda hard to see):
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Just thought I'd post this solution for all the fellow AIW owners out there. While I haven't done any strenous gaming yet (and I'm unlikely to as I use the AIW for the TV tuner and I/O ports), the TV works - no interference from the all aluminium HS. For those of you on a strict budget you could likely do the same thing with an old pentium HSF, so long as it fits. I went with the Zalman because it is pretty, and came with some thermal epoxy (which is tough to find in Vancouver)...

P.S. During the entire five minutes it took me to write this message, only one of the three pictures got FTP'd to Shaw's file servers. Talk about slow! So if the pictures don't show up, it's prolly because of Shaw - sorry![/img]

Posted: Wed Jun 18, 2003 9:55 pm
by dago
Welcom to the 'stick a Zalman NB on a Radeon' club :P

(here's mine, 2nd pic)

Posted: Thu Jun 19, 2003 2:22 am
by Riffer
I had the old NB32J on mine. Much better as it had a larger contact surface.

Re: Radeon 8500DV AIW Cooling

Posted: Wed Jul 30, 2003 9:02 am
by Wedge
oogabooga wrote:(using MikeC's ghetto fan mount)
Which ghetto mount is that? Could you provide the link please?

Re: Radeon 8500DV AIW Cooling

Posted: Wed Jul 30, 2003 1:30 pm
by aphonos
Wedge wrote:
oogabooga wrote:(using MikeC's ghetto fan mount)
Which ghetto mount is that? Could you provide the link please?
A modded PCI slot cover.....2nd to last picture on page 1 of this article: Silencing a P4-1.6A oc'd to 2GHz

Or link right to the picture

Posted: Wed Jul 30, 2003 3:09 pm
by Wedge
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