I Almost Lost Him!!!! Blorbs Suck!

[Element-Xero]

Hey I was using my comp all day and i noticed my temps were maybe a degree (c) or two higher than usual. "nothing to worry about" i thought. Then my comp started to freeze up at random un-stressful times. This immediately worried me as my comp has NEVER freezed at ANY time unrecoverably. So I look in my case at the fan on my gf2pro.....not budging. It could have been like that for hours, and probably was from what was there...

Immediately powered down, opened up the case and took out the card. The fan's plastic had melted itself and wouldn't even turn anymore :eek: At this point i got pretty scared... I took off the hsf (blorb. fan is a fan from a super orb) and I see a huge brown burn mark (in the middle since the @*#^@$ blorb is so uneven). Luckily, after cleaning off the tgrease, the core looked ok. Lapped the blue orb(took almost 1.5 hours with 100 grade sandpaper to just get the blue paint off!!!! then the fine tuning with the 800), reinstalled the factory fan, soldered a molex connector, and hooked up. Card posts, I start breathing again :) Close call, but man, the blorb is made so badly....its just horrifying.

Oh, and here is the burnt mark in the tgrease:

[jbell]

one word


luuuuuuucky!

[Element-Xero]

haha, lucky indeed.

Whoa. Just tried some OC'ing and I am getting WAAAYY better results with this lapped orb, even with the stock fan.

before:

225/460

after:

255/485

I don't even know how the ram speed could have been affected....maybe the better heat dissipation took some latent heat away from the ramsinks? I dunno.

[Arkaine23]

Instead of lapping my Blorb, I popped out the base and replaced it with a lapped 99.9% fine silver coin. GPU temps down 5 degrees. Oc on core up by 45 Mhz, but only beneficial for 29. Idea from silversinksam originally. The fan runs about 100 rpms faster too. Low profile cpu heatsinks are still better though.

[Gandalf]

Originally posted by Arkaine23
Instead of lapping my Blorb, I popped out the base and replaced it with a lapped 99.9% fine silver coin. GPU temps down 5 degrees. Oc on core up by 45 Mhz, but only beneficial for 29. Idea from silversinksam originally. The fan runs about 100 rpms faster too. Low profile cpu heatsinks are still better though.

How do you check the temperature of your Vid Card?

[Element-Xero]

I'm guessing a thermistor probe of some sort (digidoc, compunurse, or homemade rat shack most likely)

[Yodums]

OK Tip number one for Orb users. Never use an Orb from the factory you MUST LAP the thing.

[Arkaine23]

My Leadtek card came ready for hardware monitoring... Unfortunately either removing the stock heatsink disabled it, or the software wasn't in place to begin with... I think the GF3 Ti200 is the only Leadtek card that actually uses its hardware monitoring gear. Thermistor placed right across top of gpu, and I think there's one uder it too.

But Sisoft Sandra will show me my GPU and video card board temp every now and then, under "video system information". It's weird, sometimes its there but most of the time it isn't. Don't know what the deal is with that, however I was able to get the temps with a Blorb and with the Slorb at idle and right after a 3dmark2k1 run.

43 Blorb at idle, 38 Slorb at idle.
48 Blorb at load, 44 Slorb at load.

Today my gpu idle temp was 40 and load temp was 46... it wasn't as cold today as the day I made the Slorb.

[Arkaine23]

Sure you could lap it, but if you're willing to spend hours of arm-numbing labor making the blorb base smooth for a degree or two difference... why not go out and spens $5 for a silver coin? Lap that sucker flat. Get 4 or 5 degrees out of it. Sure you've gotta make it fit, or split the orb fin ring. And you have to remount the fan on the new base, as well as figure out how to attach your new slorb to the gpu. But isn't that the fun part?

[stymee]

Originally posted by Arkaine23
My Leadtek card came ready for hardware monitoring... Unfortunately either removing the stock heatsink disabled it, or the software wasn't in place to begin with...

Are you running Windows XP? I had to download the latest version of WinFox to get the hardware monitoring "enabled" on the WinFox menu.

I have mixed feelings for the Harware Monitoring now that I've used it for a while, it doesn't do any kind of logging, or store the max/average temps which makes it tough to compare cooling strategies under load. The interface is kinda cheesy as well.

I slapped a thermal sensor on the back of the core with some Alumina, and the temps showed up about 4° cooler than what WinFox was showing me, but was a consistent 4°, and easy to watch while benchmarking.