Watercooling a Radeon HD4870 - VRM a concern?

[ejking]

I am building a water cooling setup (the main goal being silence, overclocking is secondary but I still want to OC as much as possible without sacrificing silence/higher rad fan speeds).

I am leaning towards a universal GPU waterblock since I will probably be replacing the 4870s in the next year or so, but am concerned about leaving the RAM and VRM on passive heatsinks w/o a fan blowing on em.

Will I need to put a fan over the heatsinks (mainly worried about the VRM temp if i OC it) or does it not get that hot that the passive heatsink will be fine by itself?

Thanks

 

[d0gr0ck]

A neat trick I've seen people do is to leave the sock heat plate (found on reference models) on the card and install a universal GPU block in the space the heatsink would normally be in. Some even leave the original fan on, with no shroud, moving at lowest speed to keep the air moving around. Otherwise you will want some copper mofset/ram sinks on those chips.

 

[rubix_1011]

^Agree w/d0gr0ck.

You can also go with your plan (@OP) but I highly suggest RAMsinks for the modules. I have run the same universal blocks on 5 different cards with great results. I've only need to purchase mounting plates for different mounts.

 

[ejking]

^Agree w/d0gr0ck.

You can also go with your plan (@OP) but I highly suggest RAMsinks for the modules. I have run the same universal blocks on 5 different cards with great results. I've only need to purchase mounting plates for different mounts.

So can I just throw the RAMsinks and the MOSFET heatsink and not worry about it and let the airflow through the case take care of it or do i need to put a fan on top of em when I OC it?

 

[rubix_1011]

If I understand you correctly, yes, you can do just that as long as you have decent airflow. If you are concerned, you can always add a fan to blow across your cards.

I added a 120mm fan to just blow across my cards at low speed...

 

[ejking]

Best answer selected by ejking.

 

[ejking]

Awesome, thanks!