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**momaka** · 07-03-2018, 03:21 PM

Re: Your Video Card Cooling Mods - ASUS V3800M rev 1.02

As I was working on the heatsink for the above Radeon 9200 video card, I figured why not make one for this ASUS V3800M rev 1.02 (nVidia Riva TNT2 64 with 32 MB) video card too. So I did.

Original heatsink:
https://www.badcaps.net/forum/attach...1&d=1530652738

I know what you may be thinking: Oh, it's an old low-power video card, it can't have any issues with heat. But it does. Look at the back behind the GPU chip:
https://www.badcaps.net/forum/attach...1&d=1530652738
See that darkened spot? That's because the heatsink does actually run very, very hot. Of course, this is also an old wire-bond technology GPU chip, so that's why they keep working forever (though, I can't say that's the case for all wire-bond GPU chips, as the nVidia GeForce 4 TI all can fail with artifacts from excessive heat).

Much like the Radeon 9200 card, I made a new heatsink for the ASUS V3800M from my stash of spare Xbox 360 heatsinks – except this time I used a GPU rev. 1 heatsink (i.e. all aluminum and no heat pipe). Results:
https://www.badcaps.net/forum/attach...1&d=1530652738
https://www.badcaps.net/forum/attach...1&d=1530652738
… much more surface area now.

And even though this is a very old card that I probably won't use much (if at all), I did recently stumble on a cool socket 7 system last winter with a K6 CPU. It has an AGP 2x slot, and although it came with a slightly newer nVidia video card (I think GeForce 420 MX, though I could be wrong), the ASUS V3800M matches the PCB color of the motherboard perfectly and they are still of compatible vintage. So I'll probably end up pairing those together.

P.S. Oh, and here a GPU-Z screenshot.

https://www.badcaps.net/forum/attach...1&d=1530652738
Now go admire those 2 ROPs!

Attached Files

**ChaosLegionnaire** · 07-05-2018, 01:45 AM

Re: Your Video Card Cooling Mods

Originally posted by momaka View Post

this has turned into sort of a hobby for me – video card cooler modding. I do know that member ChaosLegionnaire is the other person here who likes doing this stuff

to be precise, what i do is simply video card cooler replacement with an already pre-made aftermarket one. i do not modify the existing heatsink or any existing heatsink to fit a video card as i lack the tools and expertise.

i need to get this clear cuz i dont want newbies or new members on the forum messaging me about video card cooler modding when i dont actually mod. so we need to differentiate between modding and replacement.

that aside, back to my comment as per below.

Originally posted by momaka View Post

ASUS didn't use much thermal compound and it was the cheap white stuff.

more sloppy tim application from the manufacturer again. so people, this is the second thing u do to improve your video card's cooling: video card tim replacement. i've seen many stories of video cards dying prematurely from sloppy manufacturer sweatshop tim application. while some other manufacturers simply just use shitty tim. i've had a 20°C drop in load temps on one of my video cards from just replacing the tim.

**momaka** · 07-05-2018, 10:41 AM

Re: Your Video Card Cooling Mods

Originally posted by ChaosLegionnaire View Post

to be precise, what i do is simply video card cooler replacement with an already pre-made aftermarket one. i do not modify the existing heatsink or any existing heatsink to fit a video card as i lack the tools and expertise.

i need to get this clear cuz i dont want newbies or new members on the forum messaging me about video card cooler modding when i dont actually mod. so we need to differentiate between modding and replacement.

Well, replacing the cooler with a different one is still modifying the video card's cooling, which is what I also intended to be as part of the scope of this thread.

Don't worry about anyone contacting/abusing your PM about these mods - seeing how popular this thread has gone overnight (HA HA , I'm so good at sarcasm

), I'm pretty sure you won't have problems with that.

Originally posted by ChaosLegionnaire View Post

more sloppy tim application from the manufacturer again. so people, this is the second thing u do to improve your video card's cooling: video card tim replacement. i've seen many stories of video cards dying prematurely from sloppy manufacturer sweatshop tim application. while some other manufacturers simply just use shitty tim. i've had a 20°C drop in load temps on one of my video cards from just replacing the tim.

Yeah, sometimes they do indeed do a poor job. But with newer video cards, I haven't see that as much. With cards today having pretty high TDP relative to their surface area, manufacturers have started to do a better job than before. Nevertheless, I agree that it is worth checking if you're getting high temperatures, especially on older and possibly heat-abused video cards, as the thermal compound can be getting pretty dry at that point.

This said, I still find that inadequate coolers are more often the issue than bad thermal compound application. So heatsink replacement is almost inevitable on some of the low and mid-range cards. High-end cards nowadays, on the other hand, can usually be tamed by lowering their maximum TDP in BIOS and/or increasing the fan speed. Yes, you might loose some performance that way (with reducing the TDP, which ends up reducing the clocks and voltages), but if that can double the lifetime of your video card, it may be worthwhile doing. Lately, I've been seeing a somewhat large flood of bad/defective R9 290 cards on eBay. I can't say if it's related to cooling, as 3rd party brands of the R9 290 often use pretty beefy coolers (it is a 200+ Watt beast, after all). But still, I've seen these run at around the 60°C mark under average-to-high load. So it could well be that they can't take even that much. ATI and nVidia can spread whatever lies they like, but 70°C or 80°C or 90°C as the maximum temperature is NOT OK. Yes, a flip-chip may be rated to survive that temperature for some short durations. But long term after so many power/heat cycles, not a chance.

**momaka** · 07-06-2018, 04:06 PM

Re: Your Video Card Cooling Mods - PNY GeForce 8400 GS PCI (GH84W0SPUE49P)

Now here is a real looser (of a heatsink). This PNY GeForce 8400 GS 512 MB DDR2 video card (PNY Technologies GH84W0SPUE49P+0TE4ADA) came with a super weak cooler:

While GeForce 8400 GS video cards are pretty much worthless these days, note that this is a PCI video card! Essentially, if you have an old PC (or server board) with only PCI slots, this is actually one of the best cards you can put in it, besides the Radeon HD2400 PCI and GeForce GT 520 PCI - but good luck finding these anywhere and at cheap prices. The GeForce 6200 PCI and Radeon x1300 PCI are the other popular choices, but they are a lot weaker. Then there are the older PCI cards like GeForce MX4000/MX440 PCI, FX 5200/5500 PCI, and Radeon 9200/9250, but these don't have full DirectX 9 support, and therefore won't run Aero theme in Windows Vista or 7, if that's what you intend to have.

I got the above 8400 GS in a package deal with two other cards, all for $13 shipped to my door – not bad at all!

. The ASUS V3800M posted above was actually one of the cards in that package (the other was a Radeon HD3450 PCI-E).

That aside, the stock cooler on the 8400 GS card was really not up to the task. Just look at this temperature graph:

Oh, and that was taken after I fixed the seized puny PNY (lol

) cooling fan. Who knows how hot it ran before that. But as you can see from the above graph, the idle temperature was 44°C, while the full load temperature easily reached 56-58°C with short 1 minute load tests. It may not seem like a shocker, but this was at a pretty cool room temperature of 66-67°F / 19°C with a fully open PC case. And the temperature on the GPU core would have kept rising if I ran a continuous long stress test rather than short 1-mnitue tests with break intervals in between. Also note that the temperature spikes are rather steep, meaning that the stock heatsink has small thermal capacity, poor coupling from GPU die to fins, and just small cooling capacity (i.e. not much surface area).

So this video card definitely needed a better heatsink, especially since it's a GeForce 8 series card. After all, these are well-known to go bad at high temperatures. My solution: an Xbox 360 GPU rev. 2 cooler yet again.

As usual, I took off the old cooler and measured the screw distance. It is 55 mm diagonally, which is a bit unusual for nVidia (normally they use 80 mm diagonal 2-screw pattern on older cards.) Speaking of which, here is the old cooler on the bottom side:
https://www.badcaps.net/forum/attach...1&d=1530914622

And here is the GPU core exposed (and cleaned):
https://www.badcaps.net/forum/attach...1&d=1530914622

The nice thing about this small card: there weren't many components around the GPU chip to interfere with my modded heatsink. In fact, I didn't have to cut away anything from the Xbox 360 GPU heatsink this time. Everything fit perfectly and the heat pipe element on the Xbox 360 HS didn't go past the bracket area (on many smaller video cards, it usually does, so I can't use those Xbox 360 GPU rev. 2 HSes too often… not to mention they can only dissipate up to 35-40 Watts TDP safely, so they are only fit for low-power cards.)

And the result of the modding was this:

With a relatively low-power 80 mm fan running on 7V and loosely blowing air towards the modded heatsink, this is the temperature graph I got:

Two words: HUGE difference!

With the same room temperature of 66°F / 19°C and same test PC, the stable idle temperature was now 29-30°C – that's a 14°C drop! But the load temperature was even better: maximum of 36-37°C sustained after 1 *hour* of testing, not 1 minute like before. And the temperature graph above spans over 13 minutes (what SpeedFan uses by default) rather than just the narrow 5 minutes of the first graph – thus the temperature spikes with the stock cooler shown before are even sharper compared to the above graph.

With these improved temperatures, I can safely say I expect this card to work fine in the hot summer temperatures we have now. From what I have seen in the past, GPU temperature rise is directly proportional to room/ambient temperature rise. So with 84-86F / 29-30°C temperatures I get inside in the summer (about 10°C higher than the winter), the idle and load temps should also increase by about 10°C – i.e. probably around 40°C for idle and 47-48°C for load. I say that's not too shabby.

Of course, again, this is only if I run the card with active cooling – i.e. a fan. Passive cooling requires even bigger heatsink than what I have above. So don't think this mod will allow your card to run passively.

Also, some info regarding the capacitors used on this video card:
CX300 and CX301 (marked with one blue dot): 2x Chemicon KZG, 16V, 470 uF, 8 x 13 mm.
These are connected to the 12V rail on the PCI connector. They serve as the input / high-side caps both to the GPU V_core buck regulator and the RAM linear regulator.
I replaced only CX301 with a Nichicon HN, 16V, 1500 uF, 10 x 20 mm cap. Here's an updated picture of that:
https://www.badcaps.net/forum/attach...1&d=1530914622

CX303 and CX305 (marked with two blue dots): 1x Chemicon KZG, 16V, 470 uF, 8 x 13 mm and 1x Nichicon HN, 6.3V, 1500 uF, 10 x 14 mm (2009 date code).
These filter the GPU V_core rail. It's interesting how PNY chose to use a good Nichicon cap in there (probably mindful that KZG will likely fail by itself.

)

CX307 (marked with 3 blue dots): Nichicon HN, 6.3V, 1500 uF, 10 x 14 mm (2009 date code).
This cap filters power for the RAM Vdd/Vddq rail.

Only reason I didn't do a full recap is because I don't know when I will put this card in service and the KZG caps were still in spec (even though we all know that doesn't mean anything, especially when KZG sits on the shelf unused). But I figure the Nichicon caps will hold things fine, even if the two KZG caps I didn't replace, failed.

And last but not least… mandatory (okay, not really) GPU-Z screenshot:
https://www.badcaps.net/forum/attach...1&d=1530915048
The card may only have a 64-bit memory bus, but don't underestimate it – it still offers more performance than what the PCI bus can handle.

So all in all, if you have one of these cards, it's definitely worth modding its cooler. You'll get reliability and peace of mind that it won't overheat. The stock cooler with its tiny fan is not of high quality, and will seize sooner rather than later. With this mod, I also got a much more silent video card now.

Attached Files

**Wester547** · 07-06-2018, 10:43 PM

Re: Your Video Card Cooling Mods - PNY GeForce 8400 GS PCI (GH84W0SPUE49P)

Originally posted by momaka View Post

CX303 and CX305 (marked with two blue dots): 1x Chemicon KZG, 16V, 470 uF, 8 x 13 mm and 1x Nichicon HN, 6.3V, 1500 uF, 10 x 14 mm (2009 date code).
These filter the GPU V_core rail. It’s interesting how PNY chose to use a good Nichicon cap in there (probably mindful that KZG will likely fail by itself.

)

Those 470uF 16V KZG appear to have 2009 datecodes, as with the Nichicon HN. So the KZG in question might actually be fine in the long term. The only post-2008 KZG I’ve seen bulge were subjected to extreme amounts of heat over a long period of time. Compared to the pre-2008 KZG that I’ve seen bulge left and right under non-existent thermal duress, the post-2008 KZG fail very rarely. Granted, only time will tell if the newer KZG will be reliable, but if the electrolyte was still so volatile, I’d think we’d be seeing more failures from them in the field.

Only reason I didn’t do a full recap is because I don’t know when I will put this card in service and the KZG caps were still in spec (even though we all know that doesn’t mean anything, especially when KZG sits on the shelf unused). But I figure the Nichicon caps will hold things fine, even if the two KZG caps I didn’t replace, failed.

Well, KZG were notorious for failing _without_ bulging back in the day. But I’ve seen enough of the older ones outgas by their lonesome (more than enough, actually) that I no longer trust the older ones to “die quietly”.

I think the stock cooler is inadequate because they’d rather have the card fit in small cases and die a “planned obsolescence” death (even though it’s a PCI card...) than properly allow the card to dissipate heat, even if it wouldn’t be as suitable to small form factor computers, and “last a long time”.

**RJARRRPCGP** · 07-07-2018, 03:18 PM

Re: Your Video Card Cooling Mods - PNY GeForce 8400 GS PCI (GH84W0SPUE49P)

Originally posted by Wester547 View Post

Well, KZG were notorious for failing _without_ bulging back in the day.

Interesting, because I saw bulging and oozing KZGs from a motherboard that was just sitting in a room, L O L. Looked like volcano vents on my 2004 Asus A7N8X-X motherboard, when just sitting!

**brethin** · 07-07-2018, 05:33 PM

Re: Your Video Card Cooling Mods - PNY GeForce 8400 GS PCI (GH84W0SPUE49P)

Originally posted by momaka View Post

And the result of the modding was this:

Is it just me or does that heatsink make that card totally worthless, it's way too tall and kinda kills the idea of low profile and probably wont fit in a full height slot.

**RJARRRPCGP** · 07-07-2018, 05:48 PM

Re: Your Video Card Cooling Mods - PNY GeForce 8400 GS PCI (GH84W0SPUE49P)

Originally posted by momaka View Post

While GeForce 8400 GS video cards are pretty much worthless these days, note that this is a PCI video card!

I think they're worthless for 2010s' standards, even way back in 2012, FFS!
They're basically only worth a shit in a Dell Dimension 2400 and the like, L O L

**Hondaman** · 07-07-2018, 10:45 PM

Re: Your Video Card Cooling Mods

My video card mod is pretty simple, but it works. Here I have the Gigabyte GV-R677SL-1GD. It is the Radeon HD 6770, the 40 nm "Juniper" chipset, completely passive cooled, with 1 GB of DDR5 (VGA, DVI and HDMI ports are all present). I hung a generic 120mm fan from the heatsink with some wire used for home thermostats or land-line phones. I used to do some protein folding with it, using the card's Cuda cores (I was folding for Team Saturn, not Team Badcaps, sorry). The clock would run at the higher 850 MHz clock speed under this workload, and it would never go over 53 Celsius with the fan. Impressive!

This card is in my main machine (AMD 8150 chip, 16 GB RAM, Windows 7, OCZ Mod X-Stream Pro 600W PSU). I just use it for surfing, e-mail and Office suite tasks. AFAIK, this workload lets the video card use the power-saving mode most of the time these days (157 MHz core clock and 300 MHz memory clock). It runs around 37 Celsius. Maybe a few degrees higher when playing Youtube videos or watching a DVD with VLC Media Player.

If high temps and expansion/contraction cycles shorten the card's life, I think I have done what I can to make the card last a long, long time. (I could make another fan blow on the other part of the heat sink, above the PSU fan, but I believe the additional cooling would be negligible. And BTW, the heat sink goes beyond the end of the card -- behind the "PCI Express" labels stuck on the sleeved PSU power cables.)

P.S. Note to self: Please don't use a 1/8 second shutter speed when hand-holding the camera. Images won't always be perfectly sharp like this one is!

EDIT: I'm not sure how to get this picture to appear inline. Unless I figure out how to do it, you'll have to click on it to view it. Sorry!

Attached Files

**ratdude747** · 07-08-2018, 02:36 AM

Re: Your Video Card Cooling Mods

Originally posted by RJARRRPCGP View Post

Interesting, because I saw bulging and oozing KZGs from a motherboard that was just sitting in a room, L O L. Looked like volcano vents on my 2004 Asus A7N8X-X motherboard, when just sitting!

Ditto. Two Tyan K8W's in my case

**momaka** · 07-08-2018, 09:20 PM

Re: Your Video Card Cooling Mods

Originally posted by Hondaman View Post

My video card mod is pretty simple, but it works. Here I have the Gigabyte GV-R677SL-1GD. It is the Radeon HD 6770, the 40 nm "Juniper" chipset, completely passive cooled, with 1 GB of DDR5 (VGA, DVI and HDMI ports are all present). I hung a generic 120mm fan from the heatsink with some wire used for home thermostats or land-line phones. I used to do some protein folding with it, using the card's Cuda cores (I was folding for Team Saturn, not Team Badcaps, sorry). The clock would run at the higher 850 MHz clock speed under this workload, and it would never go over 53 Celsius with the fan. Impressive!

Nice work there!

Those Radeon HD6k cards are even more susceptible to going bad when exposed to high temperatures. So with yours running no more than 53°C, I imagine it should definitely last a long time. Thus, no need to mount a second fan and only make your PC noisier. (The only advantage of two fans is if one fails under load, at least the other one could still keep the card cooled better than none at all).

I just reflowed an HD6850 today, tough I haven't tested it yet. Was giving me artifacts... if I could even get it to boot half the time (2 times out of 3, the card needed a "warmup" from a cold boot before the PC could detect it, and if it got too hot, the PC also wouldn't detect it again.) Also have an HD6670 that I managed to fix with a reflow... though I haven't tested that one lone term under stress to see if it really is fixed or not. The HD 3k and 4k series, on the other hand, do manage to work fine for a decent period of time after a reflow, especially if cooled well.

Originally posted by brethin View Post

Is it just me or does that heatsink make that card totally worthless, it's way too tall and kinda kills the idea of low profile and probably wont fit in a full height slot.

It fits in a full height slot just fine, with enough room to even put a side-facing fan to blow across the card (and space between the fan and the case side too, if needed).

So just because the card is no longer capable of being used in a low-profile "hot box" PC, it's automatically "totally useless"?

There are actually quite a few normal towers that have PCI slots only. While most are systems from the socket 478 Pentium 4 era, there are also some cheaper socket 775 systems that have PCI slots only (mostly crappy Acers and eMachines... though some did come with Pentium Dual Core / Core 2 Duo.)

That said, if I did want to keep it low-profile, I could have just used a different heatsink (with taller fins) that wasn't so big to go out of the card, and then put a 60 mm blower fan on that. That's actually how PNY should have done it really. Instead they were cheap bastards and put this inadequate cooler on it. And putting a card with such cooling in a tiny, low-profile, hot shoebox PC is pretty much guaranteed death of the card after a few years. I've seen enough of those that I don't need convincing anymore. In fact, I even have two in my parts box (regular PCI-E 8400 GS) that I use for pulling parts from, among many others.

Originally posted by RJARRRPCGP View Post

I think they're worthless for 2010s' standards, even way back in 2012, FFS!

For games, yes.

But nVidia cards started offering pretty decent hardware H.264 decoding since their GeForce 7000 series and even better with the 8000 series.

So if you're trying to set up a basic HTPC for playing a bunch of DVD-quality and 720p HD ripped content (i.e. not online or YouTube), that GeForce 8400 should definitely help with that, even if you have a very old and slow CPU. And with CPUs like Core 2 Duo, it should still help offload the CPU workload a good amount at higher bit rate HD video.

In any case, the whole point of that mod was actually more about showing what kind of heatsink size you should expect for a card of 25-30 Watt TDP (max). I've used that same Xbox 360 GPU rev.2 heatsink on many other video cards of mine, and as long as the expected TDP is under 35 Watts, it will keep things pretty cool. I even used it as a temporary heatsink on a slot Pentium 3 Katmai 500 MHz.

**RJARRRPCGP** · 07-09-2018, 03:48 AM

Re: Your Video Card Cooling Mods

Originally posted by momaka View Post

Nice work there!

Those Radeon HD6k cards are even more susceptible to going bad when exposed to high temperatures. So with yours running no more than 53°C, I imagine it should definitely last a long time. Thus, no need to mount a second fan and only make your PC noisier. (The only advantage of two fans is if one fails under load, at least the other one could still keep the card cooled better than none at all).

I just reflowed an HD6850 today, tough I haven't tested it yet. Was giving me artifacts... if I could even get it to boot half the time (2 times out of 3, the card needed a "warmup" from a cold boot before the PC could detect it, and if it got too hot, the PC also wouldn't detect it again.)

Shit! I just got a complete system with a Gigabyte AM3 motherboard and a Radeon HD 6850. Also probably at least 8 GB of DDR3, for just $150! It's a PC bundle, because I couldn't get a good deal, otherwise!

I sure wasn't going to buy a GT 1030, for gosh sakes!

**momaka** · 07-09-2018, 12:22 PM

Re: Your Video Card Cooling Mods

Originally posted by RJARRRPCGP View Post

Shit! I just got a complete system with a Gigabyte AM3 motherboard and a Radeon HD 6850.

Well no worries about that HD6850 - just pull the BIOS with GPU-Z, edit the fan curves with RBE (Radeon BIOS Editor) so that max fan duty cycle occurs at 70-75C and minimum starts around 40C. Then flash back with ATIFlash (through Windows or DOS, doesn't matter), and see if the card runs cooler. If you keep it in the 50-55C mark under full load, it should be fine... unless the previous owner overclocked it and loaded it heavily without paying attention to the temps. That was the case with my HD6850.

**ChaosLegionnaire** · 07-21-2018, 11:21 PM

Re: Your Video Card Cooling Mods

now for my contribution to the thread. i hate passive heatsinks with a passion partly because of the hot climate here. the second reason being passive heatsinks still need some airflow from a nearby case fan or some such to remain cool. in that case, that defeats the purpose of a fanless silent pc build.

so here is my powercolor go green radeon hd 5450 pci. note that this is the conventional pci version not pci-express. when i was gaming in far cry on my retro p4 pc with this card, the load temps climbed all the way to nearly 90°C!

i was using it in a horizontal atx case and there was a ventilation vent on the side near the leftmost pci slot. so i put a thermaltake 80mm smart case fan there and it brought the temperatures down a lot but it also brought with it a lot of noise because it was a 4800rpm fan!

some time later, i bought a delta air force base AFB0512HHB 50x15mm fan intending to use it to replace a northbridge cooler fan. but by chance, i found that the screw holes of the fan lined up exactly with the 43x43mm mounting holes on the 5450. i had already replaced the thermal paste on the gpu with gelid gc-2, added ramsinks for the ram, a heatsink for the plx bridge chip and mosfet sinks.

i measured the length of the screws required to bolt the fan onto the heatsink and the screws needed to be 30mm long, so i went out to get some. next, i just popped the push-pins of the heatsink off and changed it to the four 30mm long screws and nuts with plastic washers to prevent shorting, bolting the 50mm fan onto the stock passive heatsink and hey presto! turned the passive heatsink into an active one now! excellent apollo 13 style improvisational skillz using only what u have available on hand! hehe...

so even if the gpu fails within the warranty period, i could just remove the fan, screws, nuts, washers and remove the added heatsinks then pop the push pins back on to revert the heatsink to stock condition for rma.

while the delta air force base fan is pretty noisy at 6400rpm, when i add a 7v resistor to the fan, it becomes pretty silent and the temperatures only get hotter by 2°C. with the fan at 7v and an ambient temp of 30°C, the idle temp is 40°C. at max load during gaming, the temps reach 48°C. not too shabby for a once passive cooler that reached 90°C during gaming load! the only disadvantage with this mod is that the video card now takes up two slots but thats the price to pay for better cooling and a longer lasting video card!

Attached Files

**momaka** · 07-22-2018, 10:55 AM

Re: Your Video Card Cooling Mods

Originally posted by ChaosLegionnaire View Post

so here is my powercolor go green radeon hd 5450 pci. note that this is the conventional pci version not pci-express. when i was gaming in far cry on my retro p4 pc with this card, the load temps climbed all the way to nearly 90°C!

Not surprised. I've seen the PCI-E ASUS versions of that card with the weird propeller-shaped heatsink, and they often hit over 70-75°C under load in an air-condition room.

Originally posted by ChaosLegionnaire View Post

some time later, i bought a delta air force base AFB0512HHB 50x15mm fan intending to use it to replace a northbridge cooler fan.
...
while the delta air force base fan is pretty noisy at 6400rpm, when i add a 7v resistor to the fan, it becomes pretty silent and the temperatures only get hotter by 2°C.

That's not a fan! That's a jet turbine! ... or turbo compressor, if you like.

I also have a TaiSol (Delta) 70 mm fan that came with a stock AMD heatsink and that thing is mean!! If I disable motherboard fan control, I swear it must have enough wind force to blow the capacitors next to the CPU away.

I don't know what ball bearings Delta uses in these high-speed fans, but they must be of very good quality. I've seen what happens first hand with some of those cheap eBay car turbos (not on my own car, of course

).

On that note (and somewhat off-topic), I just bought some cheapo replacement bearings for a Nidec fan off of eBay (10 bearings for $1.25 shipped to me - w00t!!

). So we will see how long (or not) they will last (or not x2

). Some of them already sound a bit noisy and almost as bad as the original failed bearings, right out of the bag too! My guess would be factory rejects or perhaps just extremely shoddy quality steel and machining. I didn't expect anything more for $1, of course. Rather, I was curious to see how bad they would be. Also got some bigger bearings for an older Tamiya RC car. The bigger ones sound even worse (at least half of them anyways). But I don't care, as those will go on the wheels, where they will be exposed to dirt and whatnot - why waste good bearings there anyways.

Originally posted by ChaosLegionnaire View Post

with the fan at 7v and an ambient temp of 30°C, the idle temp is 40°C. at max load during gaming, the temps reach 48°C. not too shabby for a once passive cooler that reached 90°C during gaming load!

Just a small fan and you get over 40°C drop in temperature - crazy right!

I remember suggesting to member Pentium4 a few years back to do a similar mod on a PCI-E HD5450. IIRC, he said he was getting around 60-70°C in idle and higher when watching a movie (HTPC). I told him to put something like an 80 mm fan and run it on 7V. He connected it on 5V, making the fan turn just barely. And even then, the load temps dropped down to under 55°C under load. He said the fan was 100% silent too.

Originally posted by ChaosLegionnaire View Post

the only disadvantage with this mod is that the video card now takes up two slots but thats the price to pay for better cooling and a longer lasting video card!

True.

This might matter more if the card was PCI-E (16x) and you had only one PCI-E 1x slot right below that (I think a number of OEM boards have this silly setup).

But with a PCI card like yours that's intended to go into an older PC, most likely the PC will have nothing else but PCI slots. And last time I checked, running out of PCI slots hasn't been a thing since the Pentium II/III era, as more and more motherboards started integrating LAN, audio, and other interfaces directly onto the motherboard.

**ChaosLegionnaire** · 07-24-2018, 01:16 AM

Re: Your Video Card Cooling Mods

up next is my asus silent pipe radeon hd 3650 agp. after rummaging through my stuff, i found that a thermaltake 70x15mm fan i had that i was using to cool the zalman passive northbridge heatsink on one of my asus a8n-sli deluxe boards covered all of the heatsink fins connected to the single heatpipe on the asus silent pipe passive cooler. so i mounted the 70mm fan on the heatsink using cable ties and hey presto! again, i turned another passive cooler into an active one with minimal fuss and effort like the powercolor 5450. more excellent apollo 13 style improvisational skillz with what u have on hand again! hehehe! yea yea... i like blowing my own trumpet and feeding my own ego haha!

i also added heatsinks for all 8 ram chips, a heatsink for the plx bridge chip and mosfet heatsinks as well. the thermal paste for the gpu was also changed to arctic mx-4. owners of this kind of pci-e to agp cards beware! if the plx bridge chip runs too hot, it can cause the video card to freeze, crash or behave like it was faulty or failing. if u have this type of video card, u are strongly advised to attach some kind of a heatsink on the bridge chip as it runs quite hot, almost as hot as the gpu itself.

u may have also noticed from the pictures that one of the ramsinks on the front top left of the video card is smaller than the rest of the 7 ramsinks. why? because the heatpipe of the passive cooler ran too close to that ram chip. as a result, there was insufficient clearance to mount the 10mm tall ramsink, so i had to change with a smaller 5mm tall heatsink.

like the delta air force base fan on the 5450, the thermaltake 70mm fan was also like a jet engine!

but adding a 7v resistor on the fan connector cable tamed and silenced the noise!

with the fan at 7v and with an ambient temp of 30°C, the idle temp was 38°C. at max load during gaming, the temps reached 51°C. excellent temps i must say!

i do not know how hot the heatsink runs when it is completely passive. i dont know and i dont care to find out after what happened to my 5450 reaching 90°C during gaming!

so that was a pretty fun exercise converting much hated by me passive heatsinks into active ones.

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**brethin** · 07-24-2018, 05:05 PM

Re: Your Video Card Cooling Mods

Originally posted by momaka View Post

It fits in a full height slot just fine, with enough room to even put a side-facing fan to blow across the card (and space between the fan and the case side too, if needed).

So just because the card is no longer capable of being used in a low-profile "hot box" PC, it's automatically "totally useless"?

Yes it is, when you can get much better full height cards. That's like putting a VW bug motor in a Corvette.

**dmill89** · 07-24-2018, 09:55 PM

Re: Your Video Card Cooling Mods

Originally posted by brethin View Post

Yes it is, when you can get much better full height cards. That's like putting a VW bug motor in a Corvette.

The only redeeming quality is the fact that it is a PCI (not PCI-Express) card which makes it one of the "Latest" PCI video cards (remember there aren't many "newer" video cards offered in a PCI variant) and there really aren't much in the way of more powerful options. In the case of PCI-Express 8400gs's I'd definitely agree, I pretty much consider the "standard" PCI-Express 8400gs/8600gt scrap at this point, when you can get a gt 710 or radeon R5 230 for around the same price which is more powerful, more efficient and doesn't have a known die defect the 8400gs/8600gt don't make much sense except "special" versions like that PCI variant.

**momaka** · 09-28-2018, 03:32 AM

Re: Your Video Card Cooling Mods - Sapphire Radeon HD4650 1G

Another day, another cooler mod.

This one is a Sapphire Radeon HD4650 with 1 GB DDR2 RAM. Pictures of the stock card:
https://www.badcaps.net/forum/attach...1&d=1538126813
https://www.badcaps.net/forum/attach...1&d=1538126813
https://www.badcaps.net/forum/attach...1&d=1538126813

And GPU-Z screeny + GPU core:
https://www.badcaps.net/forum/attach...1&d=1538126813
https://www.badcaps.net/forum/attach...1&d=1538127092

As you can see, it's a low-profile, single-slot card. But again, just for brethin, I had to “ruin” another one.

The GPU temperatures were just unacceptable, so I didn't even bother to make a graph. I was getting over 65°C on the core (under full load) with an ambient room temperature of 18°C and open case. Not to mention that the card was pretty loud, too. Oh, and notice the darkening of the PCB on the back side under the GPU chip in the above pictures? I can assure you this is not from a reflow, as this card came out of a very dusty OEM PC that was probably never cleaned after the card was installed. Rather, it's just from the crappy stock cooler running the GPU too hot.

So what do we do about the card? Hmm, let's see here: TDP is rated for up to 48 Watts, so that calls for a different cooler here compared to what I've been posting above. From cooler mods and tests on other video cards (and CPUs too!), I've determined that the Xbox 360 rev.2 CPU heatsink will handle up to 60-70 Watts just fine, even with elevated ambient temperatures (up to 30°C) – as long as there is a 70 mm or larger fan blowing air on it at “medium” speed.

The HD4650/4670 being an older ATI mid-range card, screw-distance is 43 mm between adjacent screws – same as the low-end HD2k, HD3k, HD4k, and HD5k cards. I couldn't modify the “X-style” bracket on the stock Xbox heatsink to fit, so I made my own with two aluminum pieces. Here is the handiwork:
https://www.badcaps.net/forum/attach...1&d=1538126813
I must confess that I'm really starting to enjoy some machining like this with aluminum. While the aluminum pieces don't look that great (slight crooked edges on the inside of the heatsink), considering I cut them out from a larger “L” piece by splitting it in the middle, I don't think I did that bad of a job. All cutting was done by hand (saw) and drilling by hand drill (no drill press  ). And the screw tapering was also done by hand with just a regular larger drill bit. As for the four screws that will hold the heatsink onto the card: these are just standard M3-threaded screws (taken from various dead PS3s from back in the day when I muckered with those things).

Anyways, before testing the heatsink on the actual card, I wasn't sure how easy it would be to balance the HS onto the GPU core with those four M3 screws, so I decided to try the heatsink on another video card first. Here is the guinea pig of the day: a Dell (ATI OEM) Radeon HD 2400 XT 256 MB DDR2 with DMS-59 out.
https://www.badcaps.net/forum/attach...1&d=1538126813
Welp, she fit like a glove. I also had some Shin-Etsu thermal compound that I wasn't sure if it was good or not, as it looked rather hard to spread (thick, but not dry). So that went on there for testing too. The fan came from another OEM Radeon low-end card (an X1300/X1550) because the HD 2400's fan had too short of a wire to be mounted on the heatsink as is shown above.

Given that the HD 2400 XT (and Pro) is rated for about 19-20 Watts maximum TDP, I obviously had no doubts this heatsink/fan arrangement would work. I just wanted to make sure the heatsink was held flat on the GPU core – which if it wasn't, I would get bad temperatures even with that heatsink.

This wasn't the case, though: at 29°C ambient room temperature, the HD 2400 wasn't even touching 31-32°C most of the time while idle.

And under full load, I think I saw it go up only as “high” as 35-37°C

- that's with the fan barely turning too.

So with these results, I moved the heatsink on the Sapphire HD4650.
https://www.badcaps.net/forum/attach...1&d=1538126813
https://www.badcaps.net/forum/attach...1&d=1538126813
https://www.badcaps.net/forum/attach...1&d=1538126813

While at it, I also changed the one and only wet electrolytic on this card. Originally, it was a black Chemicon KZG 6.3V, 1500 uF, 10x13 mm cap. It appeared to be in good spec as well. Nevertheless, I changed it to a Rubycon MFZ, 6.3V, 2700 uF cap, as this cap spot filters the buck output for the RAM (which means a bad cap can cause serious damage). The extra capacitance from the Ruby cap was okay (as I expected).

Anyways, I haven't added a fan to the heatsink yet, as I haven't decided if I want the original Sapphire fan or not, given how noisy it is (ball-bearing fan, but bearings getting shot). So for testing, I just put an 80 mm fan up against the heatsink fins and set the fan to run at 7V (medium speed for most 80 mm low-power fans). With that setup and same 28-29°C ambient air temperature, I got the following temperature curves:
https://www.badcaps.net/forum/attach...1&d=1538126870
About 53-54°C max temperature – and that's on the 3rd/memory IO temperature sensor (which for HD4k, 5k, 6k, is always about 5-10°C higher than main core.) Main part of GPU core was just lingering 50°C. Sweet! Now that's a quiet and cool-running card.

And before I leave this, here is a picture of the stock cooler's bottom:
https://www.badcaps.net/forum/attach...1&d=1538126813
Not much to talk about, I suppose. The thermal compound was somewhat dry, but not completely gone, so that probably contributed to the high temperatures of the stock cooler. But in any case, as I've played around with these small coolers quite a bit, I can tell you from experience that they are not capable of more than 30 Watts TDP max. They can keep the card cool in idle mode but not under full load. So even with fresh thermal compound, the card would still have run hot. Thus, the modded cooler was much needed here. Maybe I didn't need to go for something as big as the Xbox 360 rev2 CPU cooler, but I have nothing that is slightly smaller – next step down is the Xbox 360 GPU rev1/2 cooler, but that will only do 30-40 Watts TDP with high airflow. As such, I'll let this overkill on there.

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