Scythe Setsugen / CF compatible VGA cooler

[wolfram23]

Just this weekend, I picked up aftermarket cooling for my 5850s. I spent several days searching for all the good VGA coolers I could find with the requirements that it
a)is less than 35mm thickness so it won't occupy more than 2 PCIe slots
b)is quiet
c)can be optained locally

My results were that I had 3 options:
Scythe Setsugen
Zalman VF1000
Zalman GV1000

I checked out some reviews and generally the Setsugen was rated about the same or better than the Zalman VF1000. The GV1000 actually would have been my 1st choice but they only had 1 open box left so I could then only get VF1000 or Setsugen. They appeared to perform very equally from what I could find so I finally decied to get the Setsugen.

The good: Very quiet

The bad: Stock VRM heatsinks come with crappy tape. I ended up having one fall off while running which broke 2 blades off the fan. Luckily I was able to exchange it for a new one... and I bought Arctic Silver thermal adhesive. After putting it all back together with the adhesive, I ran some testing. First of all, these are super quiet even at highest fan speed. But, there's currently 2 issues I have.

The first is that the top fan blows hot air down into my 2nd cooler, which ends up running up to 8 or 10C hotter. I've read that it's better to flip the fan around so it blows towards the PCB - I'll give this a try.

The second issue is that the cooling seems insufficient. In gaming (STALKER: CoP and StarCraft 2 so far) the temps are fine in the 60s, but running FurMark gets the temps to go up and up and up... in the 80s on my lower 5850, the VRMS are much higher than that even and then it BSODs (GPUZ, if I read it right, showed ~110 or 120C)

Now, I would probably bring them back and give the Zalman VF1000's a try but I used the thermal adhesive... I don't get the feeling that glue will be coming off easily. Not sure what I can do about it now...

The point: It's a decent cooler and very quiet, but it is flawed. The GPU cooling is alright and acceptable for gaming temps but at this point the VRMs are just over heating. Hopefully flipping the fan around (which will be a great deal of troubly) will help to solve this issue.

 

[davcon]

VRM heating is the most common complaint amongst aftermarket vga cooler users.
Most manufacturers don't address this.
Thermalright does and offers a few vrm coolers for the 5850.
The VRM-R3,R4,and R-5 have different designs suited for your particular needs.
Meaning they have different bends to accommodate your internal components(fit).
http://www.thermalright.com/products/index.php?cat_id=29
They can be set-up passively or you can add a fan.
Btw Prolimatech has a vga cooler for the 5850 the MK13 which is very innovative design wise for adding fans.
Word has it Scythe has a new vga cooler soon to be released.

 

[wolfram23]

I've looked at those VRM coolers but I don't really get it, because you'd need two of them per card, and having 2 cards in CF I just can't see there being enough room for all that heat sink, otherwise I'd seriously consider it.

And that MK13 is a monstrous beast, definitely way too big for my set up.

 

[davcon]

Yeah i know they're big but i was under the impression you only need one per card and definitely a monstrouus case anyways.
Too bad AC doesn't make a twin Accelero for the 5850.

 

[wolfram23]

Well, the VRMs on a 5850 are arranged 4 by 4 in an "L" shape around the GPU core and those Thermalright coolers look like they can only cover one straight line.

Update on my Setsugen's tho: I flipped the fans around and it does help a fair bit. I also discovered that I had to disable fan control in the BIOS, because it was artificially limiting them based on CPU temps. Now they can get up to 2000rpm and they're still fairly quiet, it's just a little whine at about 1600+rpm. Temps seem better although I still can't really do a FurMark test for long.

I also added the extra VRM heat sinks on the back side of the VRMs, so it should be helping a bit.

I downloaded the 10.7a drivers so I could use AA in Starcraft 2. With 4xAA, my GPUs were running at 99% lol, and FPS were around 25-35 in game. Temps were good tho, around 65C.

 

[davcon]

Those aren't the vrm chips they're ram chips.
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=254603
But your right to put sinks on the ram chips.
Nice ya gotta like Scythe fans.
Nice temps.
I have an unrelated question for you concerning Auzentech driver updates.
Did you do yours?
I tried mine and with no success.
Could you let me in on your method?
Cuz i tried my bag'0'tricks and gave up after 2 attempts.

 

[wolfram23]

Yeah I did get it to work, it took 3 tries. Had to completely uninstall all the drivers and everything related to them lol, then ran Driver Sweeper, and then the one that did the trick was also running CCleaner to clean the registry. Rebooted, and then installing worked.
It was much more of a pain in the ass than it needed to be, but it did end up working.

EDIT: I see, nice link. Those are all covered with heat sinks tho, them and the ram chips. I thought VRM was the same as VRAM but apparently not. So those are the 3 with temp readings huh? In GPUZ I think it's VRM2 that gets super hot and causes a BSOD at around 125C.

Actually while the temps were better, it was kinda strange... after, oh, 2 or 3 minutes of FurMark my GPU2's temps seemed to suddenly get much hotter... like, the temp increased even faster. It was like some threshold was breached, but my GPU1's temps remained at a more constant level.

I wonder what I can do to cool them better. Maybe I should buy Zalman's GPU heat sinks, I think the one for the VRMs is much much bigger.

 

[wolfram23]

Tonight I'm going to hopefully be able to peel off the tiny heat sinks on my VRMs that I used adhesive to stick on (little concerned about this...) and see if I can fit/modify a larger heat sink on them. Anyway, thanks for the help!

 

[wolfram23]

Best answer selected by Wolfram23.

 

[davcon]

Yeah I did get it to work, it took 3 tries. Had to completely uninstall all the drivers and everything related to them lol, then ran Driver Sweeper, and then the one that did the trick was also running CCleaner to clean the registry. Rebooted, and then installing worked.
It was much more of a pain in the ass than it needed to be, but it did end up working.

EDIT: I see, nice link. Those are all covered with heat sinks tho, them and the ram chips. I thought VRM was the same as VRAM but apparently not. So those are the 3 with temp readings huh? In GPUZ I think it's VRM2 that gets super hot and causes a BSOD at around 125C.

Actually while the temps were better, it was kinda strange... after, oh, 2 or 3 minutes of FurMark my GPU2's temps seemed to suddenly get much hotter... like, the temp increased even faster. It was like some threshold was breached, but my GPU1's temps remained at a more constant level.


I wonder what I can do to cool them better. Maybe I should buy Zalman's GPU heat sinks, I think the one for the VRMs is much much bigger.[/quotemsg
Thanks for the selection!
Thanks for your souncard help.I'll give it a go.
I used the exact same method i guess 3 times is the lucky one.
The Thermalright vrm heat sinks are really beefy.
Check out the GTX 2xx series one.
http://www.thermalright.com/products/index.php?cat_id=23