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ATI 6970 aftermarket cooler
- Thread starter pkryder
- Start date
I never thought of looking at it from that direction before, lowering the speed of the TY fan which in turns decreases the noise further but still beats the competition on temperature. Yet another plus for the Shaman but the lack of bundled (or otherwise) VRM cooling is still a slight sticking point, for me at least on my 6950.
How's that MK13 working out for you?
The AC extreme has 3 fans cooling the whole length of the card including the vrm's, where as the Shaman is more centrally cooled towards the gpu. I'm not nocking the shaman, just pointing out the (imo) advantage the AC has, taking into account the other hotspots of the card.[timko];18598227 said:
Have you thought about water cooling ?
Link
I don't know about the zalman, but the Arctic Cooling Accelero Xtreme 5870 VGA Cooler fits if you get some heatsinks for the vrm's(or I suppose you could dremmel the vrm heatsink that comes with the AC) and 1 other part of the card with the heat pad(yellow circle). The chips on the 6950 next to the vrm's (pink line) are taller than the chips on a 5870.
The AC Xtreme 5870 is superb at keeping the unlocked 6950 cool and very, very quiet. A good reason for using the AC over the zalman is the AC fans can be run through CCC or Afterburner. Where as the zalman irc are manually set.
Here is some temps for you, all running on automatic but GPUz lets you know what speed the fans are running at the time anyway.
Max 63 c @30% fan during BC2, max 58 c @28% fan during Heaven, Fallout New Vegas 53 c max @27% fan speed.
You could probably mod the vrm heatsink that comes with the AC extreme 5870 by cutting away at the (yellow part) vrm heat sink, the actual vrms are the small chips embeded into the pcb on the RIGHT hand yellow line.
I just used some heatsinks on both sides of the big(pink line) chips.
Don't forget to put a heatsink on the yellow circled part as the stock cooler plate is used!(even if you are using any other cooler too)!
I already had this cooler on my 5870 but I kept it when I sold it as the PCBs looked the same!
mounts the same and would fit the 4870 no problem and you could use your t-rad on the 6970
Soldato
- Joined
- 5 Dec 2010
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- 3,397
does the t-rad fit on the 6900 cards then???
Caporegime
- Joined
- 18 Oct 2002
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- 33,188
Oh well, finally got around to putting new psu in and trying to put the mk 13 on the 6950, no luck.
Unfortunately the sink that comes with the Mk13 for the 5870/50 doesn't fit, the mounting points are fine, it all lines up but the bit in the pic above with the pink line through it is much taller than on the last gen. Both the mk 13 vrm cooler which fans out as it goes up, and the Thermalright vrm cooler I have(forget which model number but all much the same) don't clear the height of the bit next to the VRM's.
The yellow line on the left of the pink in that picture is actually not at all necessary to cool, they are just bog standard resistors, its the VRM's, 3-5(think 3 on my 5850, more on the 6950/70) small shiny rectangles where that yellow line on the right is.
Grrr, also the accelero xtreme plus fits the 6970/50, but you need to buy separate vrm sinks, you can buy that and any other cooler you want though.
http://www.arctic.ac/en/p/cooling/spare-parts/114/vr001.html?c=2208
The downside to that aswell is they come with thermal adhesive rather than frag tape and, well, it really doesn't discuss anywhere how strong the bond is. If you remember the old school way to do heatsinks on gpu's you'd use Arctic Silver thermal adhesive, it was for all intents and purposes permanent. Pretty much ridiculous Arctic cooling don't even remotely mention if its permanent or how to remove if you can. If its permanent then you're basically saying bye to your warranty and you won't be able to move the sink to a new card.
Really pretty angry with Prolimatech as they pushed in every review the angle that they'd support new cards very quickly with new mounting kits if required or new heatsinks to fit other parts.
At this stage I have no idea if anyone makes a VRM cooler that uses the two screw holes to mount on a 6970 so you can use just about any cooler and buy a 3rd party heatsink.
The Arctic cooling heatsinks MIGHT stick on fine with some frag tape, but no clue if it will.
Personally I'm steering clear of arctic cooling, first reviews of which one killed their 5870 as far as I could tell AC made no mention of the small bit top left in that picture you need to cool, I think they either didn't notice it or didn't mention it and several people killed their cards, now they've made heatsinks that need thermal adhesive to stick rather than design something simple that uses the two screw mounting holes which would be much safer.
Worst thing is stock cooling is getting worse and worse every generation as power goes up.
Why Thermalright sell a bunch of products listed as supporting the 6970/50, while having entirely zero support for VRM cooling I have no clue.
Unfortunately the sink that comes with the Mk13 for the 5870/50 doesn't fit, the mounting points are fine, it all lines up but the bit in the pic above with the pink line through it is much taller than on the last gen. Both the mk 13 vrm cooler which fans out as it goes up, and the Thermalright vrm cooler I have(forget which model number but all much the same) don't clear the height of the bit next to the VRM's.
The yellow line on the left of the pink in that picture is actually not at all necessary to cool, they are just bog standard resistors, its the VRM's, 3-5(think 3 on my 5850, more on the 6950/70) small shiny rectangles where that yellow line on the right is.
Grrr, also the accelero xtreme plus fits the 6970/50, but you need to buy separate vrm sinks, you can buy that and any other cooler you want though.
http://www.arctic.ac/en/p/cooling/spare-parts/114/vr001.html?c=2208
The downside to that aswell is they come with thermal adhesive rather than frag tape and, well, it really doesn't discuss anywhere how strong the bond is. If you remember the old school way to do heatsinks on gpu's you'd use Arctic Silver thermal adhesive, it was for all intents and purposes permanent. Pretty much ridiculous Arctic cooling don't even remotely mention if its permanent or how to remove if you can. If its permanent then you're basically saying bye to your warranty and you won't be able to move the sink to a new card.
Really pretty angry with Prolimatech as they pushed in every review the angle that they'd support new cards very quickly with new mounting kits if required or new heatsinks to fit other parts.
At this stage I have no idea if anyone makes a VRM cooler that uses the two screw holes to mount on a 6970 so you can use just about any cooler and buy a 3rd party heatsink.
The Arctic cooling heatsinks MIGHT stick on fine with some frag tape, but no clue if it will.
Personally I'm steering clear of arctic cooling, first reviews of which one killed their 5870 as far as I could tell AC made no mention of the small bit top left in that picture you need to cool, I think they either didn't notice it or didn't mention it and several people killed their cards, now they've made heatsinks that need thermal adhesive to stick rather than design something simple that uses the two screw mounting holes which would be much safer.
Worst thing is stock cooling is getting worse and worse every generation as power goes up.
Why Thermalright sell a bunch of products listed as supporting the 6970/50, while having entirely zero support for VRM cooling I have no clue.
Caporegime
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- 18 Oct 2002
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- 33,188
From looking around I think, you can maybe get small sinks for the VRM's, they need to be narrow and long but the VRM's are actually VERY small so very little area for the sink to grip.
You can go Arctic cooling pack of VRM sinks and use them with any cooler you want but could well be permanent so a poor choice.
The Zalman heatsink "looks" like it will fit as the VRM sink is the only one that fits spreading out to the right of the sinks where there is space on both the 5870/6970. The sink itself isn't quite as good as the Shaman/prolimatech but its not half bad and hugely better than stock sink while quiet. Also pretty cheap so assuming that sink will fit a 6970, its the best option at the moment.
Not sure if you can buy the vrm sink separately.
You can go Arctic cooling pack of VRM sinks and use them with any cooler you want but could well be permanent so a poor choice.
The Zalman heatsink "looks" like it will fit as the VRM sink is the only one that fits spreading out to the right of the sinks where there is space on both the 5870/6970. The sink itself isn't quite as good as the Shaman/prolimatech but its not half bad and hugely better than stock sink while quiet. Also pretty cheap so assuming that sink will fit a 6970, its the best option at the moment.
Not sure if you can buy the vrm sink separately.
I got an Accelero Xtreme Plus on my 6950. Cools so ridiculously well compared to the standard cooler. Fits fine you just need to get same pack from Arctic Cooling for the 6970. Watch out it is quite long and won't fit in small cases with unremovable harddrive bays etc. Fits in HAF X fine though. Idles at 29-31 degrees at stock clocks unlocked and is 39-41 in games and 46 max in stuff like furmark. Oh this is at 100% all the time btw, it is so quiet you may aswell just leave it at 100%. I upped the volts in Afterburner for a cooling test to 1.3v and put clock up to like 950 and in furmark highest temp was 57 degrees.
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I'm guessing you remember the card dying from custom pc's review? That was the accelero xtreme plus. The accelero XTREME 5870 is the one I used, and the instructions clearly state to be very carefull with the chip that your talking about, touch it and the cards dead.
Regarding heatsinks to cool the vrm and the chip in the circle, I used some 'Thermalright 8800 GT RAM /PWN DDR RAM heatsinks For HR-03Rev.A,V2'. They do the job nicely.
I also fitted a Shaman on my reference 6970 clocked at 1000/1450 at stock voltage, idles at around 30-33 in games floats around 50 and with Kombustor goes up to 55. Whatever you get either the Accelero or the Shaman they will obliterate the stock cooler and will allow you to overclock further.
One problem with the Shaman is that if you have a PCI slot above your card's PCI express slot, it could potentially blocked it due to some protruding screws, so effectively the cooler will take 5 slots. I have experience this problem with my soundcard it won't fit because of the EMI shield, if you have a thin PCI card you could get away with it.
One problem with the Shaman is that if you have a PCI slot above your card's PCI express slot, it could potentially blocked it due to some protruding screws, so effectively the cooler will take 5 slots. I have experience this problem with my soundcard it won't fit because of the EMI shield, if you have a thin PCI card you could get away with it.
Caporegime
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- 18 Oct 2002
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- 33,188
Yeah, thats the one, few other people killed theres, most of them still don't know the reason though I'm fairly sure its ignoring cooling that chip.
Thing is at first they only had the "normal" one and just didn't mention anything about the chip, just puts me off at how lazy they were about it and frankly so inept.
You only have to take off the stock sink and see frag tape on the stock heatsink to work out where needs cooling, a reviewer should know better, but a company should also NEVER list support and list where to cool and not mention one of the spots.
Even more ridiculous, and not sure if its true, the accelero xtreme plus listed on another site says it doesn't come with the vrm sink/ram sinks at all, you have to order these direct from arctic cooling as the thermal adhesive they use is such short shelf life they can't keep it in stock.
So you're supposed to order the sink from one store, the paste from another, and from a quick look its a week+ from hong kong, several days from the US, or maybe from the german site but I couldn't spot the right thing on there.
All because they couldn't just make a sink that screwed on for the ramsinks.
Tommybhoy, does that pack of sinks come with a few thinner ones, I couldn't quite tell due to the size of things around the vrm's but seemed like they'd need to be very thin.
Its just a joke, I e-mail thermalright asking specific questions, get ignored, they list the 5870/50 being incompatible without appropriate VRM cooling but because they haven't got anything for the 6970/50 they say its just fine. Got a nonsense response from them after a couple weeks.
Zalman looks like it might fit, all they have to add to website is doesn't/does support 6970/50, not hard. Prolimatech are the most culpable as they actively went around saying how fantastic they'd be with support for new cards, the only thing they need is a very marginally different VRM sink and to make it available, but 3 months later and nothing, thats uber quick support, all while ignoring e-mails.
The 6970/50 should have been the SMOOTHEST move to 3rd party cooling ever, one minor vrm sink change and all available coolers could have supported the new cards incredibly easily.
Its just so frustrating, basically all these sinks offer between a 35-50C load temp drop, with silence, how can the stock sink be so bad.
Fitted the VF3000 to my 6970 which i previously had on my 5870.
On the 5870 it never topped 60 degrees under load, on the 6970 its closer to 70 ( with the fan on the lowest setting ) . but its very very quiet and thats enough for me.
The only modification i needed to make was saw off a little chunk off the large heatsink that sits on the back part of the vrams & bolts down to the board ( sawed off a bit on the left @ 45 degrees ish), as on the 6970 theres a capacitor in the way
On the 5870 it never topped 60 degrees under load, on the 6970 its closer to 70 ( with the fan on the lowest setting ) . but its very very quiet and thats enough for me.
The only modification i needed to make was saw off a little chunk off the large heatsink that sits on the back part of the vrams & bolts down to the board ( sawed off a bit on the left @ 45 degrees ish), as on the 6970 theres a capacitor in the way
It wasn't a lack of cooling the chip that killed it, it was a case of anything metallic touching the chip and that was it gubbed.
I agree, surely someone at AC must have borked a card by touching that chip when testing their coolers.
I think it was custom pc that informed AC of the problem, but I wondered what happened to the poor folks that must have borked there cards.
The highlighted one is the one I used for the 6950 vrms, I think you would need a couple of packs to be sure as by the picture you only get 1 in it. £1.80ish (the place on the back of custom pc has them)a pack so it won't break the bank. I used a pack of 'thermalright gtx 285/260 vrm heatsink' I got off the bay which had loads in it for £8(but I couldn't find any more) and noticed the '8800 GT RAM' sinks were the same and would save you money. You will also need one for the chip in the circle were talking about.
I would have cut the AC 5870 vram sink but wasn't 100% sure that the left line didn't need cooling or I would have used it. I just wasn't too keen on taking the chance with my shiny new toy.
Pretty poor show from them all so far, more so Prolimatech as the big sales pitch was how fantastic the cooler was because you could keep it and re-use it when a new card came out. I feel for you there mate.
Caporegime
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- 18 Oct 2002
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- 33,188
I'm actually wondering if I can get away with cutting the middle of my Thermalright vrm cooler out, thing is some of them have two heatpipes but both on one side so you could just chop off the other part of the cooler. The one I got(the one that puts the sink infront of the cpu cooler), has the heatpipes essentially one running along both those yellow lines in the pic though the one on the left doesn't actually touch anything so is a rather daft/overkill design. I think if I can cut the middle out and its not touching that middle bit, then stick some frag tape on the resistors on the left that "might" work.
Out of interest what kind of VRM temps are you getting with just the ickle heatsinks on.
Its very irritating how not well its been covered, I've seen a couple reviews mention the VRM's on teh 6970/50 are more efficient, therefore run a heck of a lot cooler, but is that, 3C or 35C cooler, I have no idea how much cooling they want, keeping in mind I want to overvolt the card to hell and back
With the 5870 a lot of the coolers VRM solutions ended up in most reviews as worse than stock cooling, the prolimatech did ok as the newer sink they included was bigger, the zalman did great and any of the thermalright options were fantastic, just barely compatible with anything.
I dunno who I'm more mad at, AMD, why the heck aren't their cards basically ultra quiet with stock cooling, under load, no reason not to be, horrible horrible heatsink design, Nvidia aswell, blower fans are not designed for high end cooling in any way at all. Even worse is the ridiculous small exhaust rather than a couple of dongles to give the same outputs in less space, and even the exhaust, basic principles of sound, lots of tiny little holes = a lot more noise than a few very wide slots which would allow more air and be quieter.
THen you've got the guys who want to make a living selling coolers, and still can't get their stuff sorted out, how long do they need.
Even so, temps have actually dropped under load since I put it back together with the original cooler, all down to better paste, maybe I got a better mount, not sure. Idle is still for all intents and purposes silent, but previously the fan under load would be hitting 36-40% under load, and its really that bracket where the fan ramps up to be very irritatingly noticeable. Since I put it back together, only used MX2 as I figured I'd have the sink off again soon enough and a HUGE tube of the stuff, seems to not break 33% fan now, which is just on the brink of getting loud, but not quite.
Thats at basically stock 6970 speeds/voltage, but a proper overclock would end up being really loud again.
Out of interest what kind of VRM temps are you getting with just the ickle heatsinks on.
Its very irritating how not well its been covered, I've seen a couple reviews mention the VRM's on teh 6970/50 are more efficient, therefore run a heck of a lot cooler, but is that, 3C or 35C cooler, I have no idea how much cooling they want, keeping in mind I want to overvolt the card to hell and back
With the 5870 a lot of the coolers VRM solutions ended up in most reviews as worse than stock cooling, the prolimatech did ok as the newer sink they included was bigger, the zalman did great and any of the thermalright options were fantastic, just barely compatible with anything.
I dunno who I'm more mad at, AMD, why the heck aren't their cards basically ultra quiet with stock cooling, under load, no reason not to be, horrible horrible heatsink design, Nvidia aswell, blower fans are not designed for high end cooling in any way at all. Even worse is the ridiculous small exhaust rather than a couple of dongles to give the same outputs in less space, and even the exhaust, basic principles of sound, lots of tiny little holes = a lot more noise than a few very wide slots which would allow more air and be quieter.
THen you've got the guys who want to make a living selling coolers, and still can't get their stuff sorted out, how long do they need.
Even so, temps have actually dropped under load since I put it back together with the original cooler, all down to better paste, maybe I got a better mount, not sure. Idle is still for all intents and purposes silent, but previously the fan under load would be hitting 36-40% under load, and its really that bracket where the fan ramps up to be very irritatingly noticeable. Since I put it back together, only used MX2 as I figured I'd have the sink off again soon enough and a HUGE tube of the stuff, seems to not break 33% fan now, which is just on the brink of getting loud, but not quite.
Thats at basically stock 6970 speeds/voltage, but a proper overclock would end up being really loud again.
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I'm actually wondering if I can get away with cutting the middle of my Thermalright vrm cooler out, thing is some of them have two heatpipes but both on one side so you could just chop off the other part of the cooler. The one I got(the one that puts the sink infront of the cpu cooler), has the heatpipes essentially one running along both those yellow lines in the pic though the one on the left doesn't actually touch anything so is a rather daft/overkill design. I think if I can cut the middle out and its not touching that middle bit, then stick some frag tape on the resistors on the left that "might" work.
Out of interest what kind of VRM temps are you getting with just the ickle heatsinks on.
Its very irritating how not well its been covered, I've seen a couple reviews mention the VRM's on teh 6970/50 are more efficient, therefore run a heck of a lot cooler, but is that, 3C or 35C cooler, I have no idea how much cooling they want, keeping in mind I want to overvolt the card to hell and back
Whatever the gpu temp is, on my AC extreme 5870 the vrm's are always just under it, so they must be doing there job. Huge improvement over the 5 series in that dept.
Fallout 3 New Vegas temps (about an hours playtime):
http://hotfile.com/dl/109133291/b812d2e/GPU-Z_6970_AC_F3NV.txt.html
Heaven 2.1:
http://hotfile.com/dl/109133656/b371c1f/GPU-Z_6970_AC_cooler_heaven.txt.html
Farcry Benchmark:
http://hotfile.com/dl/109133865/9b76fca/GPU-Z_6970_AC_cooler_FarCry_2_Benchmark.txt.html
Caporegime
- Joined
- 18 Oct 2002
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- 33,188
Saw your post of temps in other thread, was going to ask in there but found your response in here first
Nice to see temps are low, got some sinks, that £6 Arctic cooling pack as, can't remember who I got them from, had them directly in stock and I have a little frag tape so hopefully those might work. Didn't get a chance to do it yet as I'm playing Dragon age + watching news all weekend.
Got a couple of the packs of sinks you got aswell, so have several options to play around with, doesn't matter if I don't use the sinks, theres always some small chip that needs one. That small chip AC forgot to tell people to cool on the 5870, I had some random old heatsink stuck on there... they get used eventually
I really don't know why AC didn't make a new screwed down sink for the 6970/50, and if not at least add a couple strips of frag tape into the pack, why thermal adhesive is their first choice rather than decent frag tape. Which incidentally you can't get that easily in the UK, the really good stuff that comes on Swiftech ramsinks(which I've used on about 4 gpu's over 4 years with no issue so far) you can get in the states but can't find a source here at all. I've got some of the el cheapo Akasa stuff that I've not used before.
I think essentially AC, Thermalright, Prolimatech/anyone else making sinks for the 6970 have all decided the VRM's don't need that much cooling, but they just didn't bother to TELL ANYONE, which makes the whole situation a bit of an unknown.
Nice to see temps are low, got some sinks, that £6 Arctic cooling pack as, can't remember who I got them from, had them directly in stock and I have a little frag tape so hopefully those might work. Didn't get a chance to do it yet as I'm playing Dragon age + watching news all weekend.
Got a couple of the packs of sinks you got aswell, so have several options to play around with, doesn't matter if I don't use the sinks, theres always some small chip that needs one. That small chip AC forgot to tell people to cool on the 5870, I had some random old heatsink stuck on there... they get used eventually
I really don't know why AC didn't make a new screwed down sink for the 6970/50, and if not at least add a couple strips of frag tape into the pack, why thermal adhesive is their first choice rather than decent frag tape. Which incidentally you can't get that easily in the UK, the really good stuff that comes on Swiftech ramsinks(which I've used on about 4 gpu's over 4 years with no issue so far) you can get in the states but can't find a source here at all. I've got some of the el cheapo Akasa stuff that I've not used before.
I think essentially AC, Thermalright, Prolimatech/anyone else making sinks for the 6970 have all decided the VRM's don't need that much cooling, but they just didn't bother to TELL ANYONE, which makes the whole situation a bit of an unknown.
Soldato
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- 23 Nov 2009
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- North Leicestershire
Just saw this lol , did the mk-13 physically fit ok over the core and ram sinks than prolimatech supply. I like you have a 5850 with a mk-13 and as long as the ram sinks and cooler actually fit i'm sure something could be done with the VRM