VTX3D HD 7950 fan replacement

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14 Feb 2015
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My VTX3D Radeon HD 7950 X-Edition was making some rattling fan noise, and when gaming, it sounded like a turbine, so after some research, I found that it was not that hard to replace them with some bigger and quieter fan.
The only thing that I was wondering is if it was possible to keep the fans controlled by the graphical card like the original one.
So first I found that the two original fans was PWM fan with 4 pins connector, so I searched some fans that had the same connector.
I opted for two Arctic F12 PWM fan, apparently they are quiet (0.3 Sone), have good air flow of 74 CFM (126 m³/h), a good RPM range (600 - 1350 RPM), are PWM controlled, are chainable, and are cheap (6€).
So I decided to post my work, in case it could help someone who have the same problem ...

My setup before
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The unmodified graphic card
4mxANWel.jpg


Removed the heatsink and the fans
bFGR29Ml.jpg


Removed the fans from the heatsink
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Cleaned the GPU
pMxEpm1l.jpg


Cleaned the heatsink, then cable tie the new fans on the heatsink
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grPMaJul.jpg


Put some thermal paste
HavI6zal.jpg


The only difficulty was that the 4 pins PWM female plug was smaller than the 4 pins PWM connector of the Arctic F12 fan...
pID8kU4l.jpg
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So I made this custom cable, with an old graphic card, my stock intel CPU fan and a screw terminal
NfNvEyYl.jpg


And then connected the whole thing like this
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And put the GFX card back
utzc5lgl.jpg


Now I've an idle temp 1°C hotter (before: 39°C-43°C, now: 40°C-44°C) (by the way it is quite hot in my room), but in furmark benchmark it is now 10°C cooler (before: 76°C, now: 66°C) and in game at full clock (925 MHz) it is 7°C cooler too (before: 76°C, now: 69°C).
The fan in idle is at 30%, and in full load is only at 50% (when the GPU is at 69°C).
But the best of that replacement is that even in game, it makes absolutely NO NOISE, it's outstanding !
 
I used this
khAAbZkm.jpg
paste.
And arctic silver 5 is known to be non conductive, just slightly capacitive.

My only worry is that now the fans touch the fin pack of the heatsink, so maybe the heatsink cannot cool at those points, and I don't know how bad it is ?
 
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