High End Silent Cooling For Graphics Cards

SpinnerBait writes "With all the competition these days in the 3D Accelerator market, Graphics Card OEMs are doing anything they can to differentiate their products in a sea of competitive solutions. Recently board designs are getting even more exotic, with brightly colored PCBs, high end heat sink and fan combinations and even flashing lights for the case modders out there. However, a relatively new trend is Quiet Computing. HotHardware has an article up that showcases two new Radeon 9600 Pro and 9800 Pro cards from Sapphire Tech, that have rather impressive fanless coolers on them that are virtually silent. Great stuff for those of you gaming in the library."

Comments

What would excite me is a lower price

[amichalo]

I must be the only one out there but instead of the fancy packaging, colored circuit bords, flashing lights, included CD's filled with shareware games, and ... as of this article ... cooling devices fit for the Red October, I would like a graphics card that ...

IS IN EXPENSIVE!

Imagine that graphics card marketing departments. Keep your fluff and give me a lower cost card!

Of other note, a card shardard for laptops so I could upgrade my PowerBook G4 would be huge for me, expecially as laptops become the PC of choice for the younger, more mobile 20 somethings.

Sacrificing a PCI slot??

[whiteranger99x]

Now i noticed that the 9800 Pro is so big, considering the size of the heat sink to disperse the heat generated, users would have to give up the adjacent PCI slot.

I always thought in some computers the AGP slot and the 1st PCI slot had a shared IRQ, so this wouldn't be an issue...unless im mistaken, of course :P

I glad this is happening..

[nother_nix_hacker]

...because my graphics card is louder than my sound card at the moment! :)

Not as great as you might think

[Dr. Spork]

The problem is that the heatsink is just dumping heat into the cavity of your case, and you will need some serious (and loud) fans to remove it from there. I hate to say it, but only Apple is in a position to make PCs that have wholistic quitet cooling systems installed.

I think that NVidia were actually on the right track by blowing out the GPU heat into the outside air rather than into the case. Of course, their fan was a monster, but I imagine that this could be done better with a cooler GPU like ATI's.

Re:Not as great as you might think

[rokzy]

nvidia was on the wrong track. they HAD to blow the air out of the case because it was so damn hot it would overheat (but that was just due to ridiculous overclocking to compete with ATI). and blowing air will always be noisy, especially if blowing it through small holes.

the key imo is watercooling for high-end cards, and generating less heat for the mid/low-end cards. AFAIK some .13 micron ATI cards only need passive heatsinks.

For DIYers on a budget

[johnny6vasquez]

The sound was driving me crazy one day so I got out the hacksaw.

Just take any old stock AMD or P4 heatsink and chop it in half. I didn't have proper heatsink fasteners on my card so drilled it out and zip tied it down. The bottom is still smooth and the paste was properly applied.

The only problem was getting the stock fan off as it was glued on. I put my card in a ziplock bag
and chucked it in the freezer for half an hour. Then I used a screwdriver to pry off the fan assembly (with an old library card to protect the pcb).

Check it out (it's not a swiss watch but it gets the job done).

Pic 1: http://fullcircletraining.com/images/quiet1.jpg

Pic 2: http://fullcircletraining.com/images/quiet2.jpg

You can see I did the same thing to the northbridge on the motherboard.

happy modding.
j.

The real future

[Gossy]

This is where it's really at.

http://www.directron.com/fanless.html

It's a Zalman case that is coming soon. It will cost a lot - but the entire case acts as a big heatsink. They claim it can easily cool the hottest GPU & CPU's out there, assuming your PC room isn't a furnace, I presume. :)

Here's a japanese link verifying Zalman as the people behind it. http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/akiba/hotline/20030 712/etc_tnn500a.html

This is the holy grail for silent computing enthusiasts!

Re:Typical lifespan?

[Simon]

Does anyone know how long the typical lifespan of such a heatsink is? Would it survive longer than a typical fan-based heatsink? I run my boxes 24x7 and it seems that in a dusty environment - such as my appartment - all fans need to be replaced every year or so.

I think you just answered your own question. :-) In my experiance fans are _the_ most unreliable components in my systems. I'm using quality fans now and I've replace all fans on my GFX cards with heatsinks.

I imagine that a heat pipe would last much much longer than any fan. For a start they have almost no moving parts (well, no fiction really), and most of all no _exposed_ moving parts. (The pipe contains a liquid that moves/pumps heat by changing to a gas and back again.)

--
Simon

On the Subject of Sapphire Cards

[luekj]

I recently purchased a Sapphire 9700;

It may have not come with a fancy heavy heat sink, but it sure heated up to the point of automatic self-destruction pretty well without much prompting from myself. Needless to say, it was pretty dissapointing.

When I got the replacement in the mail I had to cool it with a smaller house fan until I went out and purchased a pci fan and placed it RIGHT NEXT to it.

So, no wonder they're pushing these big cooling rigs.......