HJohnson
asked on
Just a tip to share
Hi all. I thought I'd just share a tip with everyone regarding an experiment that I did last week with my video card and see if anyone else has tried this.
I have an ATI 8500 graphics card with an attached fan that has been dying over the last couple of months. The fan on the card was making a lot of noise and the speed/noise was fluctuating up and down. The card is about a year and half old, so the the retail warranty was up. However, there was a manuafacturers warranty of 3 years. I checked into it and realized that I'd have to pull the card, send it via courier to ATI and wait probably a few weeks before they delivered it back (repaired, hopefully - they didn't actually say they would repair, just send it in to them).
I didn't want to be without the card that long, so I decided to do the following:
- I unscrewed the fan from the heat sink on the card and removed it. The power for this fan was right on the card.
- carefully popped off the heatsink from the chip (it was glued on)
- cleaned the top of the heatsink with some solvent I had lying around.
- right in the middle, (about 2 cm square) put on a dab of thermal paste right that I got for free from a local shop
- put a drop of crazy glue (which I also had) on each of the 4 corners of the chip
- pressed on a heatsink/fan combo that I had leftover from on old 486 machine (I have a box full of free parts. it was just the right size with a completely flat heatsink bottom - no ridges or lips of any kind) and waited for the crazy glue to set up.
- plugged in the new fan into one of the power leads from the power supply.
It works perfectly! The fan has essentially 0 DB sound but pushes a lot of air. It used to be quite hot on the backside of the card, but with this new fan/heat sink, I can now just barely feel any kind of heat, even after an intense gaming session. (it's quite a bit bigger that the original heatsink)
Has anyone else done this sort of "fix" to their card?
cheers
I have an ATI 8500 graphics card with an attached fan that has been dying over the last couple of months. The fan on the card was making a lot of noise and the speed/noise was fluctuating up and down. The card is about a year and half old, so the the retail warranty was up. However, there was a manuafacturers warranty of 3 years. I checked into it and realized that I'd have to pull the card, send it via courier to ATI and wait probably a few weeks before they delivered it back (repaired, hopefully - they didn't actually say they would repair, just send it in to them).
I didn't want to be without the card that long, so I decided to do the following:
- I unscrewed the fan from the heat sink on the card and removed it. The power for this fan was right on the card.
- carefully popped off the heatsink from the chip (it was glued on)
- cleaned the top of the heatsink with some solvent I had lying around.
- right in the middle, (about 2 cm square) put on a dab of thermal paste right that I got for free from a local shop
- put a drop of crazy glue (which I also had) on each of the 4 corners of the chip
- pressed on a heatsink/fan combo that I had leftover from on old 486 machine (I have a box full of free parts. it was just the right size with a completely flat heatsink bottom - no ridges or lips of any kind) and waited for the crazy glue to set up.
- plugged in the new fan into one of the power leads from the power supply.
It works perfectly! The fan has essentially 0 DB sound but pushes a lot of air. It used to be quite hot on the backside of the card, but with this new fan/heat sink, I can now just barely feel any kind of heat, even after an intense gaming session. (it's quite a bit bigger that the original heatsink)
Has anyone else done this sort of "fix" to their card?
cheers
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ASKER
I guess that the manufacturer doesn't put in a bigger heatsink/fan because the one I put on interferes with the closest PCI slot.
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ASKER
That's good to know. ATI even refused to discuss the problem without the video card in their hands. I also would have had to pay for shipping both ways.
>>The slot1 heatsink must have looked cool on the card!<<
Well... sort of, I couldn't use two of my PCI slots anymore, but it was surely fun to show people my videocard cooler was bigger than my CPU cooler.
>> How did you mount it on the card?<<
Epoxy :o) a very thin layer.
Well... sort of, I couldn't use two of my PCI slots anymore, but it was surely fun to show people my videocard cooler was bigger than my CPU cooler.
>> How did you mount it on the card?<<
Epoxy :o) a very thin layer.
ASKER
>> Epoxy
Interesting to know that. I was wondering if an epoxy would be a heat barrier or not.
I've got two 80mm fans (one in front <in> and one in the rear <out>) right now which seems to do a great job of moving the hot air out of the case.
Interesting to know that. I was wondering if an epoxy would be a heat barrier or not.
I've got two 80mm fans (one in front <in> and one in the rear <out>) right now which seems to do a great job of moving the hot air out of the case.
In fact, epoxy transfers heat pretty good, of course, not as good as thermal paste, but with a heatsink that big I wasn't worried too much. (and it's always fun to try such things with old dust collecting hardware, if it starts smoking... hmm... too bad) I never even considered doing this on my nice Wildcat 4 7210
LucF
LucF
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ASKER
Amen! (time to add some neon then...)
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