Cpu fan on a grpahics board?

conZ

Im after ordering a new glacialtech igloo (for 2600+) for my xp1800, then o/c that..
So im gonna take the xp1800 fan and put it on my duron 1gig, so i will then have a 1gig coolermaster fan spare.

Anyways, i got this mad notion that i might put that spare cpu fan onto me gf2mx400 , somehow, and overclock that, as iv got a new gf4mx440.

So...
I was told that iv to leave one pin free on the gfx connector or something or other,.. havent really looked at the gfx board yet.

What has to be modded (im gonna mod the fan to fit it) but which wires do i change etc?

Also, can i glue straight onto the graphics board, and any specific type of glue, and in any specific places?

Help appreciated,

conZ

Gerry

When you say fan, I think you are referring to the fan, and the metal heatsink. Quite important to make that distinction You will need to remove the existing heatsink from the geforce first. Thats the "place" where you need to put your new heatsink. Normal method of removal is put it in a static bag in a freezer for a few hours, then reef the heatsink off. Then you will need to glue on the new heatsink with thermal epoxy. If you can't find thermal epoxy, you can put thermal compound on, with drops of superglue at each corner, but this is much more difficult to get right, and less durable.

As for wiring the fan up, best thing to do is just plug the fan connector into your motherboard, if you have a connector left on the board, or else remove the connector and wire it into one of the hdd/cdrom power connectors. Don't go rigging up fan power from the graphics card, the header on ther graphics card will only have been designed for the standard tiny fan, so its asking for trouble.

RicardoSmith

The fan header on the gfx card will not power a cpu fan.
The MX won't overclock that much. Hardly worth the effort m8.

po0k

In fairness, if you've got a GF2MX400 lying around, get a micro soldering iron and do the QuadroMX mod to it, much more fun

That heatsink is probably too big aswell, it'd take up a fair few PCi slots, and like RicardoSmith said there, not worth it.
If you can find a socket7 fan (they've got standard drive molex connectors most of em) slap that on with some tape instead with it blowing air onto the card's existing heatsink.

If you did try to hook the coolermaster fan up to the card's power supply chanes are you'd melt a trace somewhere on the card or worse, damage the motherboard.

RicardoSmith

When I spent some time modding gfx cards I found little advantage in putting something like a cpu hsf on a gfx over something like a crystal orb or a titan copper vga cooler. All the larger hsf did was to block the pci slot and make the card impossible to sell on. Cooling wasn't any better. All this for a 5% increase when overclocked which is all but unnoticable. The quadro mod is more interesting but then again only of any worth if you are using cad applications like 3D max that take advantage of it.

I found that most gfx cards will either overclock or they won't. lots of cooling didn't really change that as the limitation is usually the quality/speed limitations of the ram on the gfx card and not the temperature of the gfx core or even the memory either.

Sure if you have a GF4ti4200 trying to hit 4600 speeds is a decent boost but on a MX card its always going to be slow. Overclocking its only going to make it a teeny - teeny bit less slow. You won't notice it.

Gerry

I did actually say that you shouldn't wire the fan up to the card power connectors, use a molex from your psu or a mobo fan connector.

A socket7 heatsink would be much better ok, I've a socket7 heatsink on my geforce2 gts, which has no fan on it, but gets a fair bit of air from the 120mm fan at the front of the case. Also have 2 more socket7 heatsinks cut up and thermal epoxied onto the ram ( on both sides of card ). A bit of a slot A heatsink was used to finish the job.

Altogether, it makes the card clock a bit higher, even the ram. Core will run at 230 stable, and ram at 265.

It makes the card weigh a tonne, but only blocks 1 pci slot. Another good reason for replacing the gpu heatsink is that the standard creative hsf is a joke, it has practically no fins, attached with a thick layer of glue, and the fan is unreliable and noisy.

I replaced the gpu heatsink on my geforce ddr as well, and managed to sell that ok.