• Ask the community now
  • Publish
Ad

News

Asetek announces harddrive cooling system

Asetek, manufacturer of Vapochill CPU cooling system, said that it will introduce one of the first cooling kits for harddrives. The company claims that the kit can reduce harddrive temperatures by up to 42 percent. Read more

Albatron PCIe-enabled GeForce 6600 card uses heatpipe cooling

Albatron Technology has released this week the PC6600U graphics card on the heels of Nvidia's GeForce 6600 graphics chipsets. Read more

Corsair intros water cooling kit

Memory company Corsair announced a water cooling kit. Read more

Abit introduces silent cooling technology

Abit announced a new cooling technology for performance motherboards. Read more

Latest Reviews & Articles

USB 3.0 Ups Peripheral Bandwidth

USB 3.0 Ups Peripheral Bandwidth

The new USB 3.0 interface is just about ready. It'll accelerate throughput from the 480 Mbit/s of today's USB 2.0 to 5 Gbit/s, which is important for storage and peripheral devices. But USB 3.0 also introduces power saving options. Read on for more. Read more

Your 64-Bit Check List: Potential Issues You Might See

Your 64-Bit Check List: Potential Issues You Might See

Hardware and software support for 64-bit operating systems is available, but the full 64-bit reality may still cause you some distress. We created a short summary of things you need to take into account before installing a 64-bit OS for the first time. Read more

 ATI Stream: Finally, CUDA Has Competition

ATI Stream: Finally, CUDA Has Competition

You've already seen our coverage of apps optimized for Nvidia's CUDA technology. Now we're taking a look at the performance of AMD's Stream framework, which was recently revamped in a Catalyst 9.5 driver hotfix. We even sneak in an interview with ATI. Read more

Cryostasis: From Russia, With An Appetite For Fast Hardware

Cryostasis: From Russia, With An Appetite For Fast Hardware

We recently had the chance to play a bit of Cryostasis, the latest title supporting Nvidia's PhysX technology. In fact, we played the game on five different hardware configurations. Want to play this one? We'll tell you what you need in order to enjoy it. Read more

All the Reviews & Articles

VGA cooling..

Tom's Hardware: Over 1.4 million members in 6 different countries available to answer all your high-tech questions. Sign up now! Its free!
Word :    Username :           
 

I have two MSI 3870 512 meg cards. They are noisy lil' bastards but the noise after a while doesn't bother me, but having them in a enclosed desk they were getting a lil on the toasty side. So I thought I would try something; put after market thermal grease on stock cooler. So I cleaned off the stock coolers' thermal paste and put on some Zalman thermal grease from my Zalman NT9700 CPU cooler.

The Zalman grease is like fingernail polish and recorded the temps before and after.

Ambient temps were between 20 and 21C
MSI 3870 stock cooler, stock thermal compound: Idle temp ~49C, Load temp ~87C
MSI 3870 stock cooler, Zalman thermal grease: Idle temp ~36C, Load temp ~61C

Load temp was COD4 with CrossfireX enabled ( about 96-99% card usage )

I was really surprised by the temps. I saved 25-50 dollars by not having to buy aftermarket coolers to get my temps down. I think that the after market cooler guys know we are going to apply AS5 or new thermal compound/grease to our new cooler, and see drops in temps of our cards. Replacing stock coolers thermal grease with higher quality grease maybe the thing I will be doing in the future of my card purchases.


Message edited by Tydalwave on 01-14-2009 at 11:59:53 AM
Sponsored Links
Register or log in to remove.

Wow thats hard to believe.. That $2 worth of grease would make that kind of difference and the company wouldn't be doing it as part of their manufacturing process.

Reply to mcmonsterkill
- 0 +

yeah hard to believe better grease gave you that big of temps.....i replaced my grease with ac5 and temps dropped by 2-3c haha

Reply to alvine

last week i picked up the arctic cooling VGA cooler for my 4850, and attached a 120mm fan. Load temps stay below 45C with only 60% fan. The funny thing is is how much paste they put on there. I just used what came with it, but now im thinking that i should pull of the heatsink to clean up some of the paste, since it is EVERYWHERE.

On a side note. I read the instructions that came with the heatsink, and they said that in order to get the RAM heatsinks to stick, i should use an eraser to "erase" the chips. It really did work, but I was like, "What?? An eraser??"

Reply to the last resort
Tom's Hardware > Forum > Overclocking > Cooler and Heatsinks > VGA cooling..
Go to:

There are 1017 identified and unidentified users. To see the list of identified users, Click here.

Sponsored links