I just bought the built by ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128mb and now I see in another thread Sapphire's passively cooled Ultimate version. I haven't yet built my system but the video card fan is bound to be one of the louder things in there (but my RAdeon 9000 Pro w/ fan is pretty quiet). What do you think my options are? That Ultimate Sapphire one looks really nice but I did pay significantly less for mine and I wouldn't want to pay a bunch of shipping to return it. Is there a Zalman heatpipe rated for this card? Would it be fine to have a heatpipe on it even if it's not rated for it as long as there was decent case airflow? It looks like it should do fine since it's bigger than the Sapphire's heatsink. (why is Zalman's page so damn slow?) Any suggestions? Does anyone have any idea what the stock heatsink on the GPU is held on with? I don't want any surprises if I'm going to mod this expensive thing.

I would work with the card you have to make it silent via mounting an 80mm fan, using a heatpipe by zalman, or both. I don't have a 9800 card yet, but I'm sure you can do something that will ultimately be as effective as the ultimate

I wouldn't mind taking it off your hands

but you could try mounting a 1u cooler on the card and then put an 80mm fan over it.

The big heatpipe cooler thing on the Sapphire Ultimate is a Zalman heatpipe.

Buy the Zalman 80C-HP. Since Zalman fans are nothing special I'd hold off on buying the fan attachment for it. Try it without it, and if you need the extra cooling its a simple thing to rig up an L1A to blow across it.


EDIT: The stock HSF on all Ati cards is held on with little push pins. Flip your card over and you'll see them coming through the back. Just squeeze 'em with pliers and they'll push back through and pop out. The thermal pad tends to harden, so alittle twisting persuasion may be needed to fully free it. And the Zalman will reattach perfectly to the mounting holes in the card.

Heh, you pay shipping and $345. Wow, just checking newegg, they have it at $364. Anyway, it's mine precioussss.



Oh wow you're right Rusty, I didn't see the pipe before in the newegg pictures and now it looks the same to me, amazing. I wonder if that's the 80C on the Sapphire. I don't feel bad then if I'll end up with the same thing, I just have to do the (hopefully not dangerous) work of installing the heatpipe myself. Yes I did notice the pushpins. Hopefully it will be fine with no fan.

Let us know how you get on MikeK.

Having installed one of the Zalman heatpipes myself (on my 9500) I can report that the installation is fairly straight forward. Alittle complicated, but they include good instructions that appear to have been written by someone who actually speaks english. (as opposed to the babelfished instructions most companies seem to be producing) They even include the screwdriver you need for the little screws.

Whether you need the fan or not will depend on the particulars of your case ventilation. While it was in the case my 9500 didn't need one at all (even when OC'd to 9700 speeds) but now that its just mounted on a breadboard I found that it needs a 5v L1A attached to it to keep cool.

all right, I will, I still have to wait for my MOBO which I believe hasn't gotten to any stores in North America as of today. We'll see tomorrow.


I will probably have very nice ventilation but I'll be careful

I'm looking at the 9800 non-pro from Best Buy. It's built by ATI and I think the rumor is that these do not flash to a pro because of the infineon memory.

Can anybody verify this? I can get this card for $250 with a 3 year warranty, but I'm hoping to flash it to pro speeds.

Btw, MikeK, can you link me to where you purchased that board? Looks sweet.

I bought it from a Canuck store that seemed like a pretty nice place: http://www.bytewizecomputers.com/products/7/7/446

both versions of the I875 are here... and yes it does look sweeeeet, been antsy for a while now waiting for it. I splurged and got the ANNRF, the fancier one Make sure you set the currency to USD otherwise it looks pretty damn expensive (or more so). It ended up not shipping today (yesterday now). I just emailed them again, they are pretty nice people and respond promptly. The ETA for them from their supplier was Sept 12. I didn't mind the delay so much since from emailing Tyan I already figured they didn't have it yet even though they listed it, and we've (Bytewize and I) been emailing back and forth quite a bit.

Here's another store that lists it and actually listed having 2 in warehouse at one point but I guess not anymore: http://www.computerhq.com/hardware/part ... 16304.html They are not rated so nicely at resellerratings.com however. I had to Froogle to find these stores and there still isn't anything on yahoo and just the above store on pricewatch.

By the way, I just ordered the 80C-HP with my newegg order and I was curious about the 80A, it is heavier and has 100cm2 more dissipation area, but it definitely won't look as cool on my red ATI card as the silver one Hasta