Yet another crappy heatsink...

[ratdude747]

...this time on a HIS AGP card... It's the ATI Radeon HD4670 version.

Issue:



For a cooler designed and made by arctic cooling, I was surprised... that was very, very rough machining! The worst I've seen in a while, dare I say ever...

I had the heatsink off to swap the stock compound for some AS5 (since I bought 12G of it recently)... not to mention it was a PITA getting the cooler back on, even for a GPU. they used plastic sleeve spacers on the screws... getting those on, and keeping them on, and still getting the GPU mounted in the process was w/o a factory jig was a challenge.

Must be an aftermarket GPU thing... I had a similar issue with an EVGA Geforce 7600GT card... but with OEM cards, they usually get the machining nice and smooth.

[370forlife]

Re: Yet another crappy heatsink...

I remember getting a pair of socket 370 coolers from masscool I believe that the machining on the contact surface was so rough they were completely unusable. You can smooth them out a bit if you get some real fine sand paper or emery cloth and get a nice smooth finish. Remember though that is removing material so if it uses stand offs it may not tighten down onto the die as well as before.

[ben7]

Re: Yet another crappy heatsink...

I remember getting a pair of socket 370 coolers from masscool I believe that the machining on the contact surface was so rough they were completely unusable. You can smooth them out a bit if you get some real fine sand paper or emery cloth and get a nice smooth finish. Remember though that is removing material so if it uses stand offs it may not tighten down onto the die as well as before.

Yeah, it might be useful to have a small copper shim in there than to take the risk of not getting enough thermal contact!

Also, make sure you clean it well after sanding/polishing, don't want any fine metal dust getting near the electrical stuff :boom:

[ratdude747]

Re: Yet another crappy heatsink...

Yeah, I sanded it with some 60 grit emery paper ... that got it sufficiently smooth. I cleaned it up with some alcohol swabs when I was done.

edit- Fanner tech (includes speeze and masscool) is crap. Rough machining, junky fans, thin wire. Junk, junk, junk.

[Pentium4]

Re: Yet another crappy heatsink...

I've only come across one Mass Cool fan and it didn't seem horrible. It was starting to die after 50K hours. The bearing motor was overheating because it was starting to seize. A drop of oil and it's fine again.

By the way, nice card. That's one of the best AGP cards you can buy

[ratdude747]

Re: Yet another crappy heatsink...

I've only come across one Mass Cool fan and it didn't seem horrible. It was starting to die after 50K hours. The bearing motor was overheating because it was starting to seize. A drop of oil and it's fine again.

By the way, nice card. That's one of the best AGP cards you can buy

I know. The highest model for sure. As for best, some say the 38xx is better... it's debateable.

It's also in IMHO one of the best AGP platforms: Intel Xeon Gallatin, Supermicro X5dal-TG2. Better than the Opterons, as they had the AMD 3111 AGP chip of doom ruining thier x64 abilities and crippling them to Xp x32 and older. Yeah, you could run dual core in them, but they for workstation use weren't good until the Nvidia Nforce Professional (with SLI, what I use now).

[Sparkey55]

Re: Yet another crappy heatsink...

I always use MobilOne Synthetic Gear Lube 90W in my fan bearings. No problems.

[cheapie]

Re: Yet another crappy heatsink...

The Radeon HD 4000 series was available in AGP? I thought AGP was long dead by then.

[Pentium4]

Re: Yet another crappy heatsink...

The Radeon HD 4000 series was available in AGP? I thought AGP was long dead by then.

nvidia stopped much sooner with the 7 series, ATi went till this card, the 4670

[ratdude747]

Re: Yet another crappy heatsink...

The Radeon HD 4000 series was available in AGP? I thought AGP was long dead by then.

Ati Had a handy PCI-E to AGP chip which let them do that as long as profitable.