Passively cooled 9600XT mod

They make noise, too.

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Schroinx
Posts: 218
Joined: Wed Apr 09, 2003 3:21 am
Location: Denmark

Passively cooled 9600XT mod

Post by Schroinx » Thu Jul 15, 2004 5:31 pm

So i finally got around to mod my vidcard. I exchanged the stock fan/heatsink on my Sapphire 9600XT 256 with an old heatsink from a P133. The P133 heatsink is from a ICL/Fujitsu system, where the cpu was passively cooled. I glued it on with arctic silver epoxy and left it for a couple of hours to cure. After testing with a few hours of CS I can say that the heatsink get warm, but not hot. The 256 mb version of the card is clocked slightly lower on the ram than the stadart 128 mb version, but it not different in any other way.

So now I'm the happy owner of a truely silent GPU. :D

spartikus
Posts: 14
Joined: Wed Jul 14, 2004 7:07 am

Post by spartikus » Fri Jul 16, 2004 1:35 am

Nice work, been thinking about doing a similar sorta thing on my GeCube 9600XT 128MB. The fan is pretty crappy on it anyway, and the heatsink is made out of really poor material/aluminium material.. :( Have you noticed any artifacting in any graphics intense games?

Schroinx
Posts: 218
Joined: Wed Apr 09, 2003 3:21 am
Location: Denmark

Post by Schroinx » Fri Jul 16, 2004 1:52 am

Well, no. Cause I don't play any real graphic intensive games, until HL2 arrives. :D Anyhow if I have done it properly then I don´t expect there to be either, since the stock cooling solution is really crappy as you write. I suspect that there is only a fan on this card because costumers expect there to beone on such a card. The heatsink is so flimsy and the fan is not really doing a lot of work, so with a serious heatsink I doubt it. If done right, you can always put a 50 mm fan on the heatsink and run it at 30%. That should be way better than the stock solution and almost silent.

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