Crystal Orb or IceBerq for a Radeon 9100?

The fan on my Visontek Radeon 9100 PCI in the first box in my sig has a bearing in its fan thats starting to seize up. It makes a grinding/whining noise when i start the computer & it continues for ten to twenty seconds. I'm going to put some Machine oil in it & see if thats all it needs but if it continues I'll need a new heatsink & fan for it as it uses a nonstandard sized fan of course. So which one is the best out of the two. Basically I'm only considering noise levels since overclocking the card won't gain anything with the 33MHz PCI bus. If I had a 66MHz PCI slot I might have considered a little overclocking but I don't think its going to be a concern any time soon.

The Crystal Orb Copper/Nickel (A1178) Heatsink

or

The IceBerq CCB-A1C Copper Heatsink

I plan on freezing the card to remove the heatsink & following the Radeon 8500 heatsink upgrade guide they have on the site to put on the new heatsink. My compound of choice will be straight Arctic Alumina as was recommended. Also is there a good, inexpensive, fanless option? I need it to fit it within the space between two PCI cards since all three of my PCI slots are being used so theres no way I could just strap a heatsink from an Athlon or P3 on the card . Would a copper 1U heatsink, sans fan, be thin enough to fit the space between expansion cards & cool the GPU? I have access to a good saw & a dremel so I can cut the heatsink to a usable size. Thanks in advance.

Its a pity that you can't go for anything of a *real* HS/Fan combo.
Is a powermac microATX or something? Hey, doesn't really matter if you look at the other rig.
I assume the powermac is more of a workstation then a gamestation? (and the PC vice versa)
In that case, one of those coolers should be good enough.

Me, personally, I'd go for the thermaltake cooler.
I dunno, but they've never let me down in any way, so this is really nothing but a personal preference.
AND, it sure is silent as heck, newegg doesn't say how loud(how silent) that iceberg is...

AUGH! looks small and cheap, check out this heatsink mod for this guys video card
http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=311298
Cheap and very efective if you ask me

actually its not cheap for a sp lol. get a artic vga cooler v3 u wont be dissapointed

CheeZeTM, I don't want to be offensive, but you didn't really read his post, did you?

Moto7451 said:

Basically I'm only considering noise levels since overclocking the card won't gain anything with the 33MHz PCI bus. If I had a 66MHz PCI slot I might have considered a little overclocking but I don't think its going to be a concern any time soon.

...

I need it to fit it within the space between two PCI cards since all three of my PCI slots are being used so theres no way I could just strap a heatsink from an Athlon or P3 on the card .

Click to expand...

He needs something that'll be silent, compact and will keep the temps healthy. No more.
Indeed, it looks small and cheap, but it'll do in its application.

Yeah the Mac is what I do everything on except Halo. The PCI bus basically ended its useful life as my gaming machine. It plays Q3 well so I use it for that. The Mac was purchased back in 1998 & I've been upgrading it since then. It works great for what I do. The Radeon 9100 was added in because I like to tweak it & because it does speed up Q3 a good bit compared to the old Rage 128 I had.

That was sorta off topic so I'll get back to the video card :-D

The fan seems to be terminal. Its grinding pretty bad. Machine oil probably can't fix it. I think the blades might be unbalanced or something which then caused a problem with the bearings. I'm going to go with the Thermaltake heatsink unless someone can give a better option. I might try cutting up my AMD heatsink. Theres about 2CM of room between the cards so I'd guess that I'll cut it to be about 1-1.5CM & grind the base down so that the 1-1.5CM has more fin to it. Its a heatsink off of an Athlon XP 2400+ so it has a copper base which is something I always like to have in a heatsink.

Also does anyone know where I can get a heatsink like this Radeon 9000 has?

Thanks

This will be silent and cheap: http://www.allelectronics.com/cgi-bin/category.cgi?category=270&item=HS-70&type=store

Ive got a POS little fan on my ati saphire 9000. Wish I could find something to replace it like the heatsink that 9000 pro has.

fhanderson, that HS doesnt seem big enough?

http://www.allelectronics.com/cgi-bin/category.cgi?category=270&item=HS-75&type=store

http://www.allelectronics.com/cgi-bin/category.cgi?category=270&item=HS-966&type=store

the second one looks great

I took a look at those & they're just a little too big. It needs to fit within the 2CM between PCI cards. Cutting those probably wouldn't be too hard though. I may buy a few & try them out using some sort of retention system. Keep em coming please. Between this forum & another one I'm getting some good ideas.

EDIT: I think I found what I need. This looks just like that person used in his article. I'm going to buy this & the Crystal Orb I think. Its 1CM tall so it has room for a small fan if I ever need it but the heatsink has about 10 times the surface area of the one it has now. Thanks for all the help. If you have any more suggestions I'll still take them. I need to figure out a retention clip if I want to try both of them I guess. We'll see what happens.

Edit 2: I found a taller version that will fit within 2CM. This one

Thanks again.

Im thinking about some artic silver adhesive to get it to stick.

I think the Arctic Alumina adhesive will probably work just as well since I'm not going to overclock it. Also its not as conductive which is a plus. I might try a few things. I'd like to not use an adhesive since it makes testing the heatsinks easier. So I'll be working on a retention system thats less permeant. If I can't come up with anything I'll just mix some arctic alumina adhesive with regular arctic silver so that it holds on well enough to stay but be removable with the freezer method. Any suggestions on what to use to remove the glue that will be on the heatsink? Does flux remover or acetone followed by 90% pure isopropyl alcohol work fine?

iceberg all the way.

iceberg sux, marginally better than the stock fans ati uses better to go with the TT

I went & ordered the two black anodized 486 heatsinks from this long time component distributor & I also ordered Thermaltake from newegg.

Apparently the site I ordered the 486 heatsinks is down so the links I had are useless. But when I get them I'll post the end result. I'm pretty sure the 486 Heatsink will be fine. I plan on lapping the 486 heatsinks to remove the anodized layer & to remove what they are calling a sticky backing. I can only assume that its not nearly as good as Arctic Alumina adhesive. Whats a good mixture of Arctic Alumina & the Arctic Alumina adhesive? Half & half or should I go for a different ratio, or should I not bother at all? I'd like it to be removable using the freezer trick but I don't know if thats possibly with AAa.

not sure, but once your done experimenting on your card, let me know what worked....ahahahahahaha...

I have the exact same card as you (visiontek Xtasy 9100), I bought the Iceberq4 Pro for it. I used arctic alumina since the fan was too heavy to stay on using thermal grease. Word of caution though, the iceberg DOES NOT fit correctly with that 9100 card. Your probably better off with something else. To make things worse I applied too much arctic alumina on my ramsinks and I think I ruined the card because whenever I try something graphic intensive (3dmark2001se) I always get VPU recover messages. Now I can't get anything off the damn card (and no, putting it in the freezer does not work). Heres a pic of my card...

I got the Thermaltake, not the Iceberq. I'm leaning towards a passive cooling method in any case. I'll see what I can do to remove the AAa. Theres probably some way to do it with the freezer. It probably depends on your mixture. One thing that I find amusing is that that today the fan stopped seizing up. Of course, its the day after I bought the heatsinks

Well if you find a way to remove the arctic alumina, please let me know

SantiMun said:

I have the exact same card as you (visiontek Xtasy 9100), I bought the Iceberq4 Pro for it. I used arctic alumina since the fan was too heavy to stay on using thermal grease. Word of caution though, the iceberg DOES NOT fit correctly with that 9100 card. Your probably better off with something else. To make things worse I applied too much arctic alumina on my ramsinks and I think I ruined the card because whenever I try something graphic intensive (3dmark2001se) I always get VPU recover messages. Now I can't get anything off the damn card (and no, putting it in the freezer does not work). Heres a pic of my card...

Click to expand...

iirc the pro is for geforce4s - the non-pro is fro ati/gf3s.... (not that that's much help to you now....)