A Cheap Way of Cooling Video Cards
or "Some simple, overlooked cooling Tips"
Date: 15 May 2000
A lot of folks ask how I normally keep my video and sounds cards cool without having to spend alot of money. Well, it's alot easier to show you rather than explain with just words.
First off, the emphasis here is on cheap OR ease of installation. Also, whenever applicable, the best solution without voiding the manufacturer's warrantee on the card. Now, I know there's a few sites out on the Net that will show you how to build some pretty radical cooling units, but that's not what I want to do here. Except for the Tennmax cooler I'll talk about below, these are just some simple, common sense, tips that I've found useful and consider easy enough even for the novice overclocker to build. Nothing outrageous.
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| Note: for instructions on how to remove the factory heatsink, click on image. |
It's always been fairly easy to cool the CPU. Just buy one of the many mega-size heatsinks on the market, slap it on the processor with a little bit of thermal compound, add a few propellor-like fans, and you're pretty much ready to rock. With video cards however, it always been a little more harder to find off-the-shelf solutions and it wasn't until recently that an entirely new cottage industry have sprung up around this need. Even so, it's still sometimes hard to find the right product to suit your particular needs. Fortunately, it's not that difficult to fabricate your own cooling solutions and save a few bucks in the process. The next few pages are a work-though of the cooling setup that I'm using for my primary system which currently sports a Guillemot Prophet DDR, but it can really be applied to just about any video card or PCI/ISA setup.
The biggest heat generator in my case right now is my GeForce. Rightfully so, it gets most of my attention. For the GPU chip itself, I use a Tennmax Detonator. Not that I'm crazy about the Tennmax, it's just that I got lazy and didn't want to modify another Pentium-class heatsink for it like I did a previous project for friend's TNT2u. Besides, I tried one out on my Creative TNT Ultra a while back it worked pretty well. The Prophet, like the Creative TNT2u/Annihilator series, already has the heatsink holes pre-drilled into them, so attaching one these little heatsinks was blissfully easy. The fact that the unit uses retaining pins instead of thermal tape was great also as it permitted me to use my own thermal compound. For moderate overclocking and if you don't feel like spending an entire afternoon measuring, drilling out, and mounting an improvised Socket7 heatsink, I recommend this unit for it's convenience and ease of installation.
**UPDATE: Recently, I got tired of the Tennmax and decided to recycle a socket7 heatsink from an old P200MMX I used to have. Although a bit small for overclocking a P200MMX, it's more than suitable for the GeForce or similiar hot running card. Instead of drilling out the heatsink and mounting the unit with screws, I took an easy route and simply used silver-based, thermal conductive epoxy. Naturally, this bigger heatsink worked much better than the Tennmax, allowing me to raise the core above 155mhz+ with no problems. Unfortunately, I still could not get the memory above 340mhz without visual anomalies. Seeing as memory bandwidth is the bottleneck right now, I left the overclock setting at 140/340, which seems to be the sweet spot for me anyway. If you're interested in trying the thermal epoxy route yourself and can't find it locally, you can request a
free sample from these good folks.