VGA cooling..

[tydalwave]

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.

 

[mcmonsterkill]

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.

 

[alvine]

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

 

[the last resort]

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??"