- Apr 11, 2011
- 1,956
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I have been searching around here and elsewhere for a decent and affordable cooling solution to the dilemma of cooling a GTX 470 card and have seen some (relatively) expensive options: Zalman & Arctic Cooling & water blocks. If I want to upgrade the cooling on my reference GPU I have to spend additional bucks which cancels out any bargain shopping I have done. My question is has anyone tried one of the simplest and costless solutions: going commando by taking off the shroud?
Shrouds are not designed with engineering in mind. Some marketeer found that if you take the picture of a buxom lass and place it on a product it will sell better to adolescent males and those who aspire to be adolescent males. Other marketeers decided that they needed to brand their own products. It won't do to be selling acme products when your competition is Rolls Royce.
Theoretically, a shroud would only be beneficial if it somehow directed cool air over the heated GPU and GPU RAM, and channeled away hot air. But the plastic POSs which are shrouds only push air towards the heat sinks and trap the air (or, at very least, hinder the escape of hot air).
Now the shroud in the ASUS Sabertooth is designed to circulate air and isolate the MB circuits from the hot add-in components: the CPU and Video Card. ASUS engineers, by their design, acknowledge one of the fundamental principles of computing: heat kills. So they protect their circuits from the ambient radiation of other components.
If a desktop is properly designed it should solve the problem of heat by dissipating it from the inside of the case to the outside, But while all of this cooling is going on we have the modern GPU encased in a shroud which retains heat.
I am going to try to run the GPU in its stock shroud and measure temps and then take off the shroud and measure the difference if any. I invite any and all enthusiasts to try this simple experiment and report your findings. Maybe my suggestion is full of hot air, but whenever I get hot I take my shirt off. Ockhams razor anyone?
Shrouds are not designed with engineering in mind. Some marketeer found that if you take the picture of a buxom lass and place it on a product it will sell better to adolescent males and those who aspire to be adolescent males. Other marketeers decided that they needed to brand their own products. It won't do to be selling acme products when your competition is Rolls Royce.
Theoretically, a shroud would only be beneficial if it somehow directed cool air over the heated GPU and GPU RAM, and channeled away hot air. But the plastic POSs which are shrouds only push air towards the heat sinks and trap the air (or, at very least, hinder the escape of hot air).
Now the shroud in the ASUS Sabertooth is designed to circulate air and isolate the MB circuits from the hot add-in components: the CPU and Video Card. ASUS engineers, by their design, acknowledge one of the fundamental principles of computing: heat kills. So they protect their circuits from the ambient radiation of other components.
If a desktop is properly designed it should solve the problem of heat by dissipating it from the inside of the case to the outside, But while all of this cooling is going on we have the modern GPU encased in a shroud which retains heat.
I am going to try to run the GPU in its stock shroud and measure temps and then take off the shroud and measure the difference if any. I invite any and all enthusiasts to try this simple experiment and report your findings. Maybe my suggestion is full of hot air, but whenever I get hot I take my shirt off. Ockhams razor anyone?
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