Changing Radeon 8500 fan

alexb · Post by **alexb** » Fri Sep 17, 2004 11:57 am

Hi,

Now that I have changed my drive to quiet Samsung

the video card fan (Radeon 8500) is the loudest! I play games a lot and the card is actually overclocked and from reading around here I've heard it's a hot video card.

I also don't like to do a lot of moding with passive cooling since I am afraid I may damage stuff... so is there a better fan I can replace my ATI fan with? I am not a silent freak, but love quiet systems... so a little bit of noise is tolerable to me.

Thnx

alexb · Post by **alexb** » Mon Sep 20, 2004 2:54 pm

Anyone? Someone must have changed their Radeon 8500 fan!!!

mathias · Post by **mathias** » Mon Sep 20, 2004 3:42 pm

No, people don't normally change just the fans, so you probably will have to put on a more significant heatsink, if passive cooling is what makes you nervous, you could have a fan on it or blowing at it. You could hook up a resistor or fan controler to it, but that'll increase your temps and will most likely at least reduce your overclock significantly.

Check the power dissipation sticky for how hot your card is compared to others, R8500 is included in the first graph, though yours will be somewhat hotter because of the overclock.

alexb · Post by **alexb** » Mon Sep 20, 2004 7:09 pm

mathias wrote:No, people don't normally change just the fans, so you probably will have to put on a more significant heatsink, if passive cooling is what makes you nervous, you could have a fan on it or blowing at it. You could hook up a resistor or fan controler to it, but that'll increase your temps and will most likely at least reduce your overclock significantly.

Check the power dissipation sticky for how hot your card is compared to others, R8500 is included in the first graph, though yours will be somewhat hotter because of the overclock.

Thnx, so if I get a quieter fan, it won't do much?! Like Sunon 40mm, or Papst?!

jabba · Post by **jabba** » Mon Sep 20, 2004 9:59 pm

You can use a passive Zalman VGA cooler, perhaps in combination with the optional quiet 80mm fan. I don't know how much heat an 8500 outputs, but do not disable the fan on that card, especially if it is OC'd.

Link here:
http://www.zalman.co.kr/eng/product/vie ... 8&code=013

Plus the added bonus of when you upgrade your video card, you can put this sucker on your new card, and put the old noisy HSF back on the old card.

You card has to have mounting holes and the HSF on the GPU can not be thermally adhered.

JazzJackRabbit · Post by **JazzJackRabbit** » Wed Sep 22, 2004 11:26 am

My 8500 fan started vibrating, screaming like a banshee, so I just took it off. During normal 2D operation GPU is completely cool, during 3D it heats up a lot, but I've been running it almost a year and a half like that with occasional gaming about 4-8 hours a week and have had no problems at all.

DISCLAIMER:
1.I have LE version clocked at 250Mhz, full nonle version is clocked 275Mhz so it may run hotter.
2.Do it at your own risk, I may not be responsible for any damage you incur on your system...

Sizzle · Post by **Sizzle** » Wed Sep 22, 2004 3:56 pm

Doesn't the 8500 have the same mount points for the fan as the 9600? If it does, a Arctic Cooling VGA Silencer Rev3 would it on that card.

mathias · Post by **mathias** » Wed Sep 22, 2004 6:21 pm

I don't know if you'll be able to get a much quieter fan, 40mm fans are generally not quiet, and it would be rather tricky to install, I'm assuming the heatsink design on your card requires it to blow air centrifugely more than forward, and typical fans should be designed to do that as little as possible, and you'd have to separate the fan from it's frame, and then you have to attach it somehow.

From what I've heard, some 8500's do not have mounting holes. Because of this, the stock heatsink is attached with some sort of thermal adhesive, which makes it hard to remove. I don't know if that's the case with your card, so I won't go into the various ways of removing a glued heatsink, you could search for that anyway. Also, without mounting holes, you can't use the big zalman heatpipe coolers. And a ZM80D is more than you need anyway, and quite heavy, a ZM80C isn't much lighter, and a ZM80A is even hevier than the D version.

Do you have a lot of PCI slots you don't need? There are lots of other potential solutions, which ones you can use depends on how much room you have.

VERiON · Post by **VERiON** » Mon Sep 27, 2004 5:32 am

1. remove stock heatsink
- put a card in a plastic bag in a fridge for a few hours,
- gently slide a flathead screwdriver under the heatsink
- put a credit card or a thick paper UNDER the screwdriver
- gently twist the shrewdriver and the heatsing will pop-off

2. scrub the GPU chip with a sharp knife to remove remaining glue

3. lap a GPU with a 600/800/1000/2000 grid sandpaper (water)

4. buy a thermal adeshive

5. buy/find PIII or ATHLON stock heatsink (celeron 1,2 stock alu heatsink is a perfect match)

6. glue a heatsink with thermal adeshive

it works for me

2d = fanless (pretty hot ca 45 - 50 'C)
3d = 5V
3d overclocked = 7V

pretty quiet

---
you can also try removing stock fan from heatsink and replace it with 80mm fan and construct a cardboard duct for sucking cool air from outside a case

ps: sorry for my "funny english"

flyingsherpa · Post by **flyingsherpa** » Mon Sep 27, 2004 4:54 pm

here's what i did for an AIW radeon 7500:

i took the tiny, whiny fan completely off but left the heatsink on (i wasn't brace enough to try to remove that). then i strung up a panaflo 80mm from a pci slot cover that had parallel and serial cut-outs. i used foam tape to decouple the fan as much as possible from the case and then i attached the fan to the slot cover with two large zip-ties. the fan is connected to my fan controller and i always keep it at a silent 5V. i don't know before-and-after temps, but i know that the 80mm at 5V puts out more flow than the old fan so i figure i'm good. never had a problem. and actually ATI later released this card with just a passive sink so it was probably borderline for needing active cooling all along.