80watt Pelt on a 9600xt

[ManicHaze]

This was a project my friend an I took on.

The thought of cooling my 9600xt with a pelt, and using only a stock amd sink seemed alot easier said than done. We were expecting ambient temps or slightly below. We did a little better than that. :cool:

Anyway, The mod helped out the card overclock quite a bit. It went from 500/300 stock to 560/350 with no arties. Before the mod i was only able to reach a stable clock of about 530 or so for the core and 330 for the mem (yeah, its kinda low for this card, i was somewhat disappointed) Its an ok overclock, it needs a volt mod to go any higher. But pelt cooling it sure helped alot. I could only get about 30,000 in Aquamark3 stock, and after the mod I was ablet to get around 34,000-35,000

0 - 3C idle (74F ambient) so cold that my temp probe freaks out. Even after playing Call of Duty for a few hours it doesnt break 10 C.

http://www.gregzenger.com/hosted/pelt9600xt/parts.jpg
In the pic above you see the Cosel PS, the pelt, the mounting hardware, the stock amd sink and fan, the passive pII coolers, and the cold plate. This project was nick named "project Void" because it appeared on the fan after ripping off the sticker.
http://www.gregzenger.com/hosted/pelt9600xt/peltmod.jpg
That is the finished project (yeah, i know, that baby has more sink than the Titanic) ;)

Hope you guys enjoyed reading about my adventure, lol.

-Ross

Cost of mod: ~$60

$10 for Pelt
$10 for mounting hardware
$10 for cold plate
$20 for 13amp@12v Cosel PS
$10 for thermal compounds etc.
FREE Stock AMD sink & fan (came with my 2600+)
FREE pII sinks (chopped for ram sinks)

[Iron Hawk]

Yes, this was a great endevor, thanks for the great weekend project Ross! I have more pictures and will post a brief overview of how we put this together.

-Greg

[ManicHaze]

Yeah! It was a killer project, too bad we couldnt overclock more :'(

I couldnt have done it without Greg. Thanks again man!

-Ross

[Iron Hawk]

We started out by removing the stock cooler, which was not appropriate for the overclocking we wanted to do. The stock cooler did look cool, but it did not perform. Ross had attached the thermal probe and recorded temps of 40c Idle, 50c Load.

http://www.gregzenger.com/hosted/pelt9600xt/00.jpg

We then proceeded to mark the AMD stock cooler for the holes

http://www.gregzenger.com/hosted/pelt9600xt/01.jpg http://www.gregzenger.com/hosted/pelt9600xt/02.jpg

The holes were drilled on a drill press, then tapped (6-32) unfortunately our tap broke on the first hole. We decided to drill the holes large and put a nut on the other side of the copper base. To get the nut to fit we had to remove some of the heatsink fins.

http://www.gregzenger.com/hosted/pelt9600xt/03.jpg http://www.gregzenger.com/hosted/pelt9600xt/04.jpg

Once this was accomplished, we mounted the peltier and coldplate to the heatsink, Arctic Alumina was used.

http://www.gregzenger.com/hosted/pelt9600xt/05.jpg

[Iron Hawk]

The holes for the mounting hardware were drilled and tapped (4-40). This went smoothly; perfect taps! The mounting hardware was installed (I added a nut for the heck of it, it doesn’t really have a function there) and the neoprene (precut by Danger Den) was fitted.

http://www.gregzenger.com/hosted/pelt9600xt/06.jpg
http://www.gregzenger.com/hosted/pelt9600xt/07.jpg http://www.gregzenger.com/hosted/pelt9600xt/08.jpg

The thermal probe was set and sealed in with a piece of electrical tape, AS5 was applied to the core, and dielectric grease was put around it to help seal from condensation.

http://www.gregzenger.com/hosted/pelt9600xt/tempprobe.jpg

We mounted the coldplate/pelt/heatsink to the combo using mounting hardware for the Maze4 waterblock by Danger Den. I also happened to have this plastic mounting support plate that came with my Maze4-1. (The coldplate is also from the Maze4-1 GPU cooler by Danger Den) I had modded this plastic mounting support plate slightly to allow it to clear my board properly. Ross really likes it, he says it looks like a Strut Tower Brace; it also prevents the card from flexing under the heavy load of the cooler.

http://www.gregzenger.com/hosted/pelt9600xt/09.jpg http://www.gregzenger.com/hosted/pelt9600xt/10.jpg

[Iron Hawk]

The fan was remounted, and the pelt and fan were wired to a Molex. Our PSU was also wired to accept this Molex connection. This was done in such a way that the pelt could not receive power without the fan running. Heatsinks were cut from a passively cooled PII Heatsink, and mounted with Arctic Alumina Thermal Epoxy.

http://www.gregzenger.com/hosted/pelt9600xt/peltmod.jpg
http://www.gregzenger.com/hosted/pelt9600xt/11.jpg http://www.gregzenger.com/hosted/pelt9600xt/12.jpg

We fired it up and learned that Ross's thermal sensor wouldn’t report temperatures below freezing. In fact, the temperature was so low at first that it kept flashing random numbers and beeping, but after a few seconds that stopped.

http://www.gregzenger.com/hosted/pelt9600xt/13.jpg

Once the computer was booted into windows and we were able to put some load on the card the temperatures came above freezing. Under load at stock speeds we saw about 5C! After doing some tweaking with the PSU voltages, we settled on 13.1 V as the sweet-spot for our setup. On average, Ross sees 10C temperatures with his overclocked card after playing Call of Duty for a fair amount of time.

Ross did a test to see how hot the card would get if he unplugged the Pelt and Pelt Fan. I think he saw about 40-45C. This of course caused the card's overclock to lock up, but after returning to stock speeds, the card would run passively cooled. And cooler than the stock cooler! So if the pelt's psu were to fail, the card would not be lost, just any unsaved information in your current session (assuming it locks up). Not bad.


I hope you find this adventure inspiring. It was a great mod, and was fairly easy.

Best of luck to the Overclockers.com community,
-Greg and Ross.

[ScrillA]

Good job dude! You did a nice job presenting that project. Nice picks and detailed too. Hope it continues to work out for you.

[krag]

Thanks Iron Hawk! I am going to be following in your footsteps pretty soon. I am gonna order a cold plate from DangerDen and some mounting hardware. Most excellent walkthrough!!!:clap: :clap: :clap:

[creepy]

I was just wondering how well this works. A 80w has trouble keeping up w/ my ti200.

[ManicHaze]

it works very well, right now its idle at 2C/34F and its 75F ambient right now. Thats with the card overclocked, which doesnt seem to really effect the temps heavily. If i was to do a volt mod it would, i have a ton of case ventalation. There is a 60mm fan that blows air out the empty pci spaces. That is critical, if that hot air off the sink lingers it will kill the temps, they will get much warmer. I have a total of 8 fans either pulling air in or out of the case. (that includes the 2 in the psu) and i used to have a 12'' squirell cage fan in the bottom, but it got in the way of my sound card, i was forced the move the sound card down because that sink/fan/pelt combo isnt exactly 1U lol

[L337 M33P]

Originally posted by creepy
I was just wondering how well this works. A 80w has trouble keeping up w/ my ti200.

The 9600XT has a very low thermal output power. The core voltage is quite low and as such you don't really need a stock cooler as big as that. I get a 90MHz overclock on my Sapphire card with a really crummy cooler.

ManicHaze - several people are working on a volt mod for the card, including me, but the power regulation chips seem to vary from manufacturer to manufacturer. If the 3rd party guys made a different PCB then it seems they picked the chips to go with it. Finding out how to do one is failry easy if you know what you are looking for, you need the datasheet of the chip you suspect to be the controller, voltages across the capacitors nearby and a whole lot of guts... And pomona grabbers help.

I plan on doing a less extreme mod, just a simple 1U copper cooler drill 'n' tap job on an Akasa AK-350 ;) Oh, and RAMsinks, if they ever come in :mad:

[ManicHaze]

awesome, i hope you have good luck with the vmod, if you figure it out or you come across someone who knows how to, you can PM me, that would be cool.

Yeah i am disappointed as to how this asus card overclocks, it seems the sapphire cards overclock much better. 90mhz is a nice overclock, that puts u in the 590 range, that should be good for 4500+ in 3dmark03 assuming your system is as L337 as your name suggests ;)

[JFettig]

Lookin pretty good, but one thing I see that you should change is the backplate, it should be touching the card so that the card doesnt bow.


Thats something I have thought about doing too. if I had a better video card:p

Jon

[ManicHaze]

yeah, there are alot of components of varying heights on the back of the card, it puts stress on the tall ones and none on the short ones, i didnt want to risk damaging the card itself. THe card doent bow at all, its short enough that it doesnt, so the brace is mainly there for looks i suppose.

[JFettig]

I know when I put good pressure on my waterblocks my card bows like crazy, I made a little bracket that puts pressure only on the backside of the gpu and I can put a LOT of pressure on it.


Jon

[sandman001]

That bracket would keep the screws from going farther apart though, so it would keep it from bowing.

[ManicHaze]

yeah, it seems to work better ontop, because sandman is right, the studs are held straight. EIther way, the card doesnt bow much at all. Just ever so slightly.

[sandman001]

I have another question, where did you get the heatsinks you use for ramsinks? I want some.

[ManicHaze]

the sinks were off of a couple of old pII's that were server chips. They were passively cooled so they needed some rather big sinks. I got them free from my dad's work.

[ManicHaze]

UPDATE: it rained today, and the humidity was way up there. Apparently the board wasnt fully protected from condensation like it should have been, and it took a crap due to the high humidity. The card itself still works but windows doesnt recognize it and wont allow for proper driver install.

Hopefully I caught it in time, and there is no permanent damage to the card, if there isnt Greg and I plan on conformal coating the card and making sure this doesnt happen again. But there were actual BEADS of water on the card, like it had been sprayed, so I hope its not dead. Wish us luck.

[rhino56]

how many times do screws fall thru your workbench in a day?

[Prandtl]

Originally posted by ManicHaze
UPDATE: it rained today, and the humidity was way up there. Apparently the board wasnt fully protected from condensation like it should have been, and it took a crap due to the high humidity. The card itself still works but windows doesnt recognize it and wont allow for proper driver install.

Hopefully I caught it in time, and there is no permanent damage to the card, if there isnt Greg and I plan on conformal coating the card and making sure this doesnt happen again. But there were actual BEADS of water on the card, like it had been sprayed, so I hope its not dead. Wish us luck.

that would have been my first comment, you should consider insulating the back side of the card. Put a good layer of dielectric grease and then a piece of neoprene, your DDen hold down should keep it in place. What happend to you might be something similar to this. (http://www.phase-change.com/index.php?action=Articles_page&cat=Guides&id=25&page=5)
Otherwise, great work, I love it. :)

[ManicHaze]

That isnt my workbench, that was my friends keyboard tray. We just put the stuff on there to take pics of it.

Thanks Prandtl, we worked hard on it. Hopefully the card isnt dead haha.

[capmuffin]

thats an awsome job,however i got 575,330 with my reg ATI 9600xt and a zalman heatpipe.i think its ur card,because ur cooling PWNZ

[ManicHaze]

yeah it is the card. it haasnt ever been the best overclocker by any means. This mod wasnt just for performance, it was mainly an experiment. We were curious to see if an 80 watt pelt could cool a 9600 core with a stock amd sink as the pelt cooler. And it worked. so we are happy.

[ManicHaze]

Update: the card is alive, it works just like id used to. Time for some conformal coating and some dielectric grease and some neoprene! lol.

[krag]

Originally posted by ManicHaze
Update: the card is alive, it works just like id used to. Time for some conformal coating and some dielectric grease and some neoprene! lol.

You lucked out bro! I ran a 9800 pro and a 9800 XT on a 80w tec with no condensation problems. All I did was cover the exposed transistors on top of the gpu with dielectric grease, cover the area around the cooling head with foam and the back of the card directly behind the gpu with foam and its good-to-go!

This is all the insulation that you need for a 80w TEC:

[ManicHaze]

yeah! that looks sweet man, i like the green coolant thats trick.

Yeah we werent expecting it to condensate as much as it did it never did til it rained for like 3 days straight though. We had alot of dielectric grease on it but it wasn't everythwhere it needed to be. WHat happened was the water ran because the card bends slightly, enough for the water to run to the lowest edge/side of the card, and on its way it bridged some gaps. thats why i'm going with full conformal coating.

as far as being lucky, i've seen much worse, but yeah i'm glad my card is ok.

[=ACID RAIN=]

UPDATE: it rained today, and the humidity was way up there. Apparently the board wasnt fully protected from condensation like it should have been, and it took a crap due to the high humidity. The card itself still works but windows doesnt recognize it and wont allow for proper driver install.

As I was scrolling down I thought about condensation protection. I'm glad the card is fine now though. I've got a 9800 flashed to pro that I considered for a TEC, but I run this machine 24/7 and I'm not home alot, so I decided to stick with just water cooling.

Good job on the project!

[ManicHaze]

ANother Update: we just got done conformal coating the card yesterday, so far not a single issue. The conformal coating and the large amount of dielectric grease and foam will prevent any more condensation for sure. I would post pics but it looks the same. Just conformally coated and more dielectric grease under the neoprene around the core and coldplate.

[Meow Cat]

your cold plate is too small.

get a big thick plate.

[ManicHaze]

the cold plate is just right, it provides the perfect compliment to the combination.

[JFettig]

Meow Cat, tell me, why should it be bigger and thicker? what do you have to support what you say?


Jon

[L337 M33P]

He can't - he's banned :p

[JFettig]

well then I wasnt looking for an answer, just to point out that his post doesnt mean anything, makes me wonder why he got banned;) :p


Jon