Aftermarket GPU cooler which works well in 90° rotation

[Tangerine123]

I have a Silverstone Fortress case in which motherboard is in 90° rotation, so graphics card is in vertical position.

I wanted to buy a aftermarket cooler, because Twin Frozr III is too loud when playing games, but after researching information on the internet I found very conflicting opinions about effectiveness of aftermarket air coolers. The problem is - as the motherboard is in a 90° rotation, the heat pipes in the cooler have to work against gravity unless the heat source is located below other parts of the heat pipe.

For every person with a working aftermarket cooler in a vertical motherboard, there was another person saying that for him the same cooler is not working. As I can't figure out if any of the available coolers will do a good job, I hope some of you have enough experience or knowledge to help me out with finding the best solution.

Thanks.

 

[may1]

I'm going to assume that your case has at least 3 slots available (inc. VGA card itself)and enough length to fit in an aftermarket, dual fan cooler.

Then Accelero Twin TurboII from Arctic is the best option to go.
I've recently purchased one of these for Christmas and I can say that this product is the best investment I've made after investing in a CPU cooler.

My case does not have great air cooling capacity, however after installing this, the GPU did see temps decrease by a considerable margin.

But, more importantly, it is rediculously quiet. The cooler comes with an 7v/12v adaptor to control fan speeds, and while the 12v configuration was noticeably quiet, the 7v made it rediculously quiet - plus it is still cooler than the default fan that came with the VGA card (which by the way is a dual fan configuration of 560ti OC from Gigabyte) by around 5-6 degrees celcius. Literally, noticeable sound is coming more from the PSU than the VGA, and even if I concentrate listening, I'm not sure whether sound is coming from the CPU or the VGA.

As for the vertical position of the VGA, this should be a problem for you. You're looking into a solution that decreases sound level, NOT temparature, and the 7v configuration will likely beat cooling configuration of the factory-standard dual-fans on those 6950s that are already positioned vertically anyway.

 

[Tangerine123]

Thank you. I will order this cooler now. As it is not too expensive I am willing to risk and see what happens. I will post here about my adventures with installation and testing.

 

[may1]

Thank you. I will order this cooler now. As it is not too expensive I am willing to risk and see what happens. I will post here about my adventures with installation and testing.

Cool. Just as a side note, you don't have to install the RAM heatsinks if you don't want to - one reason why you might not want to is because it takes ages for the glue to settle on the RAM. If the VGA didn't come with anything like that, might be best to keep it that way.

 

[Tangerine123]

Cool. Just as a side note, you don't have to install the RAM heatsinks if you don't want to - one reason why you might not want to is because it takes ages for the glue to settle on the RAM. If the VGA didn't come with anything like that, might be best to keep it that way.

Ok, so - following your recommendation I ordered Arctic Cooling Accelero TWIN TURBO II. There was a freakishly long delay, reason being lack of stock, but after almost 6 weeks of waiting I got it delivered.

I have to thank you again, because it works great. And now a bit more about the installation process and results.

When I removed the stock cooler (which was MSI Twin Frozr III) I discovered that there are no heat-sinks whatsoever for memory or any other components. The whole cooling process was happening through the main cooling plate (not sure how it is called, but you know what I mean). So following your recommendation once again, I did not bother with installing heat-sinks, but simply replaced the cooler. After that I realised I made a mistake, because I mixed up and used the wrong spacers which were too tall and resulted in lack of contact between cards plate and coolers plate. Luckily I noticed that quickly and changed the spacers. I used the pre-applied thermal paste, because that was easier and I always could tinker around and change it for my Arctic Silver 5 if needed.

So here are the results. I used the 12V power connector for the fans.

I run a MSI Combustor stress test (98% GPU load). After about 4 minutes the temperature peaked at 48c degrees. Run it for full 10 minutes, temp stayed the same.

Today I decided to test it a bit more and selected 'extreme burn in' option in MSI Combustor. In 5-6 minutes temperature reached 63c degrees. Run the test for full 25 minutes. Temperature staid the same (63c).

In both cases it was impossible for me to tell by the noise if and how much the fans are spinning, because the Twin Turbo II is amazingly quiet. For all I know, at idle and under extreme burn in test the noise was exactly the same - i.e. I couldn't hear the Twin Turbo II over the Silverstone Fortress 2 case fans on low setting (and I have replaced the top case fan with GentleTyphoon D1225C).

So for me this is clearly a success and even better result than I expected.