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MSI FX5900 - Passive Cooling possible?

Posted: Tue Nov 25, 2003 2:46 pm
by Herodotus
Hi,

I've got an MSI FX5900 card; this comes with a pair of moderately quiet fans, but they're still enough to cheese me off. Officially, I should be buying the newer Zalman HS with the fan (or possibly bunging a panaflow on instead), but I'm not sure how much I'm going to gain over the existing fans, other than perhaps constant speed (and who really cares how much noise it makes when you're blowing the crap out of people in Quake anyway?)

Could I get away with just passive cooling on this? If not, am I likely to see a significant difference paying GBP45 for the new HS/fan combo, and if so, am I better of with a panaflo? Any suggestions gratefully received.

Lucian

Posted: Tue Nov 25, 2003 3:55 pm
by Shadowknight
I looked at Newegg and the only version of this card I saw used a really big copper heatsink and a single 60/80mm fan. If the model you have has a pair of 40mm fans, you would definetly notice a big difference if you switch to a Zalman using either their fan or a Panflo, even at 12v.

According to the Zalman site, you MUST use a fan on the card, due to how much heat it puts out. Also, check on the new Arctic Cooler GPU cooler, I don't know if it's compatible with the 5900, but it's lighter, comes with a built-in fan, and blows the air from the card to the outside of the case.

Posted: Wed Nov 26, 2003 1:34 am
by Tobias
TomsHardware reports 36.5db for your card

http://www6.tomshardware.com/graphic/20 ... de-75.html

and MSI seems to boast about 26db for a card with supposedly the same cooling

http://www.msi.com.tw/program/products/ ... hp?UID=503

How incorrect it may be, I think I tend to go with Toms on this one, they are after all supposed to be objective and even though they tend to favour MSI, their numbers are higher. If you go with an undervolted Panaflo, you will definetly gain alot noice-vice...

Posted: Wed Nov 26, 2003 3:14 am
by nutball
I've got the Zalman ZM-80 whatsit on my 5900 Ultra, and it works just fine. With the size of the card and all the end product is a little bit bulky and certainly dominates my case, but it works as advertised.

I've got the associated Zalman fan effort on it, running in "quiet" mode, and the card temperature reported in the control panel rarely goes over about 60-70-odd C under load, which isn't a great deal more than it was with the stock HSF. Given that the shutdown temperature is 140C by default I can't see this is a problem.

As for noise, I can't hear the combination with the case closed. Another key benefit is that the fan now runs at constant speed, and doesn't throttle and up down when changing from 2D to 3D workload. It might be possible to run without the fan, I haven't tried that yet.

I posted my experiences in this forum a month or so ago, might be of interest to you.

My card wasn't the MSI model, so I can't tell you for sure whether you'd benefit, but if I had to guess I'd say yes.