Opinion needed on replacement hsink for gfxcard

Ronan|Raven

The fan on my gfx card has always been loud but lately it has become apparent that it is faulty. As a result it sounds like a hoover screaming in pain, ruining my nice peaceful pc.

I could RMA it as it is only 2 months old but the rma procedure will take far to long for my liking, so I have decided to just buy a replacement hsink/fan for it. I have been looking at some solutions from ZALMAN but they are a bit pricey and seem very heavy (935g!) I came across the "blue orb" from ThermalTake and it seems to give good reviews and allows for a spot of overclocking.

Anyone have any opinions or ideas on the above?

Sir Random

You could try removing the sticker on the fan and putting a drop of oil on the bearing.

Ronan|Raven

That I could try, will give it a go later. I took the card out during the week and noticed that the fan does appear to be very loose which I think is allowing it to scrape off the bottom of the heatsink.

j0e9o

that will volid ur warranty replacing the fan can i ask wot card it is btw? If its wat i think it is the fx5800 then its all too well known as one of the major owes of that card and alot of the gf fx series

Ronan|Raven

The card is a geforce4TI4200 128meg version. I know replacing the fan will void the warranty but I was told by the suppliers whom I got it off the RMA time is over a month maybe longer on the card and *** I cant really do without it that long!

CombatCow

Get one of these bad boys - iv got one for my TI4400 and it's great,v.cheap too ( half the price of wot i payed in peats )

http://www.hitide.ie/catalog/product_info.php/products_id/47

CombatCow

SuprSi

Don't bother with the Blue Orb - I got one a while ago as it said it was silent, but it's definitely not! I went with the older Zalman passive cooler, where you need to glue it to your GPU. I attached a small fan running very slowly (can't hear it at all) and I've never had any problems.

Looking at upgrading now, so gonna get on of those Zalman heatpipe jobbies.

Si.

RicardoSmith

You can buy an overpriced GF4 replacement fan in Maplins or Peats. It would take about 5 mins to fit it. It maynot be quirt though. The Blue Orb and the Crytal Orn are noisy. If you want silence then the Zalman heatpipe is your only option. Pricey though. Another alternative is to get into modifying heatsinks to stick to your card and running modified fans at 5 or 7v to reduce the noise. Both the Zalman and modified HSF combos take a little bit of fiddling to fit.

I used a Titan Copper VGA/Heatsink cooler before on a GF2 I had. Because its designed for getting power for the motherboard and not the graphics card it means you can 5/7v the fan. I used a Zalman fanmate which was quieter than 5 or 7v mod in my opinion. Not sure if it would cool a GF4 enough though. I haven't tried it on my own GF4ti4200 yet.

Meadows

I had a noisy 5900ultra (well it wasnt noisy, it was the silent msi one, but much too noisy compaired to my dead silent rig) but I removed the fans and put a silent sharkoon case fan on it instead on the existing heat sink and now it runs silent and cooler than ever. I top idea for anybody with that prob ;-)

RicardoSmith

How did you fit it? Most case fans aren't silent. Do you have the specs of the sharkoon one?

Virus_Inc

Learned from bitter experience. Keep the old fan in case something else blows up on the card... that way if the card is unusable you can still RMA it and they won't have as much of en excuse to bounce it...

Ronan|Raven

Well in the end due to having to pay numerous bills today i put off getting the Zalman or any other replacment solution. I dragged my P.C. into work today. Removed the existing fan from the heatsink and found a fan attached to an old CPU heatsink and glued it into the top of the heatsink. Stuck it onto an "adjustable speed control dealey" and et voila! runs like a dream. stuck a thermal prope near the gpu and it reads 34 degrees tops while running any of the ut2003 benchmarks or running battlefield. I can now adjust the speed of it down to around 2000rpm to allow for silent PC usage once again or rev it upto the maximum 7000 odd rpm for when im gaming.

po0k

Ronan, if it's one of the square heatsinks just slap on a socket7 fan, should be fine for cooling, and stillquiet. They were proper fans them.

If it's not a square type, look at a heatpipe solution, cos no matter what you do you're going to end up losing a PCi Slot (you'd think mobo manufactuers would have allowed for this and moved the pci bank down a space).

RicardoSmith

Yeah those old socket 7 HS are much better than those Orbs and similar. Like you said you can pull them out of old systems for free. I fix 'em with a mix of epoxy artic silver, mixed so it can be removed if you want at a later stage.