Artic Cooler ATI 5....

[Diddyman]

Hi,

I have noticed that my PC has been getting very hot, especially the front of the case.

Temps have always been a bit higher than normal and after having a good look I have put it down to my X800XT PE gfx card, as it blows the hot exhaust air directly on to my HDDs and the metal frame at the front of the case.

I have just ordered a Artic Cooler 5 for the card, I know that the Zalman is the better option, in most cases, but the big plus with the Artic cooler is that the exhasted air will be dispelled out of the back of the case, instead of heating up the front and cooking me slowly in the process.

I have never done any mods to gfx cards before, so have a couple of questions:-

1) How easy will it be to remove the existing cooler on the card ?
2) Will it we worth removing the pre-applied thermal conduction material and applying some AS5 instead for the GPU core and memory chips ?
3) Any other useful tips will be welcome.

Cheers
Diddy

 

[hominid]

When i changed mine, I put an Arctic 5 on a X800Vivo, there was either 2 or 3 phillips screws on the back of the card that needed to be undone for the original heatsink to be removed - it only cooled the graphics core.

When that was done I cleaned the core of the card, it had some Arctic silver type compound on there already but I decided to use new.

The Arctic 5 cooler cools the memory as well as the core, I put Arctic Silver 5 on the core and the supllied white compound on the memory chips front and back. The Arctic 5 cooler uses 4 screws to attach itself to the card, the only time that I felt nervous was doing up the screws on the back of the heatsink. In the end I did them up as hard as I could with my hands, then took a screwdriver and put on an extra half a turn - for me this seemed enough and has proved OK since. It's all a matter of judgement so don't take what I say as gospel.

Also I needed to bend the back plate on the Arctic 5 cooler as it was too close to the CPU heatsink but hopefully you won't have this problem - it's quite a big piece of kit.

 

[Diddyman]

Many thanks, just need to wait for it to arrive now.

Diddy

 

[Diddyman]

Fitted the cooler now and in terms of temps I am well impressed !!

Under load temps droped from 76 to 56 !!

And that was using the standard thermal compond supplied.

Only anoying thing is that at default fan speed of 43% there was a slight anoying noise comming from the plastic fan casing a sort of vibration, if I turned fan speed up to 100% then it went.

I have managed to almost get rid of it my wedging an unused floppy drive power lead head between the memory heatsink where it over laps at the side and the outer casing that houses the fan.

Also 2 of the heat pads for the memory were way off of the correct position (i.e. they would only be in contact with about 1/3rd of the memory chip, so I had to try and peal them off and reposition them.

Other than that I'm chuffed, and the front of my case is a lot cooler now

Diddy