Modding my 5700LE

Hey, I have a 5700LE and I want to install some old chipset heatsinks on the RAM (one HS can cover 2 RAM chips at one time). But I haven't figured out a way to secure it to the PCB without the thought of drilling a couple holes in my card. Are there certain spots where you can drill holes into the PCB without hitting any circuits or damaging the card in anyway?

use thermal paste and glue. don't drill. make sure there is no metal to metal contact with any of the traces on the board.

Arctic Silver Adhesive will work wonders, just make sure you follow the directions to a T or risk screwin' things up royally.

Let us know how it goes and if you get a better mem o/c.

BTW, what sinks do you have?

MonroeM said:

Arctic Silver Adhesive will work wonders, just make sure you follow the directions to a T or risk screwin' things up royally.

Let us know how it goes and if you get a better mem o/c.

BTW, what sinks do you have?

Click to expand...

I'm using no name sinks that I salvaged off of my chipsets/CPUs from my previous old systems. I was just looking through my collection of sinks, and I thought of about cutting them and placing little fans on them somehow. I've already managed to put an old CPU fan (60mm I believe) onto my cards core HS. I dont know if you know what the fans on the 5700LEs look like, but they are CRAP. I bet they dont even push out 2 CFM. This is my card (except I have the 128MB version, so instead of 8 RAM chips, I only have 4):


Notice the fan tucked inside of the HS. I took that fan out (yes, it was a b**ch, the most tiniest screws live in there ) and put another fan on it that takes up the entire HS. So far i'm getting much better temps on my core than I was before. I also added some Nanotherm PCM+ thermal grease onto the core before I layed the HS back on, so that should be making a HUGE difference as well.

oh, and thanks for the tip on how to secure those sinks onto the ram chips. I don't know what I was thinking when I said "Drill". lol Immediately after I posted I realized what a complete dumba$$ I was.

Now I must sleep.

I just read up on that Arctic Silver Adhesive. I've heard of it before, but never looked into it. Thats some pretty scary stuff. hehe So I could use it to stick two pieces of HS together and it would still be thermally conductive between the two?

Yes Swatdog, in theory you could "connect" pieces together, which probably wouldn't cool as well as one huge piece but it would work.

If you are afraid of losing your warranty by applying the ASA to your card, you could always buy thermal pads. If you do, make sure you get some by a reputible company. I'd give you a link... but honestly I'm not sure where you'd find just thermal pads w/o heatsinks (like most of them come w/).

I'd recommend finding an old Slot A or Slot 1 based processor HSF and milled the base and drilled 2 holes in it and mouting it with screws. The size would allow you to actively cool the GPU and the RAM since you have the 128mb version. This way you could avoid using permanent thermal epoxy. BTW bonding heatsinks together is not a good idea. The thermal epoxy is intended to bond the heatsink to the hot component...

I cut a CPU HS from my old 166MHz system into little pieces. Now I just need that thermal adhesive. However, I do not wish to wait for it to come over the internet, so I checked out BestBuy's website. They have this but will it do that same thing? I just need something to secure the HSs on the chips. Will that do it if it dries?

That stuff at best buy is not an adhesive.It's just grease.

hmmm, is the 5700 le a good card? my friend got one and says it rocks, im not so sure...

Darkstorm_13 said:

hmmm, is the 5700 le a good card? my friend got one and says it rocks, im not so sure...

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Its cheap, but good for the price. If you're on a REAL tight budget I would get this. Its not a speed demon, but it runs everything I run (AA, HL2, Splinter Cell, etc) my suggestion is tho to get either a 6600GT or something but you will have to pay a bit more.

Use Arctic Alumina, I did when the heatsinks fell off one of my card's ram during transit and its great. Its 100% nonconductive & nonconducive, and supposedly you can still get it off (carefully) after placing in freezer for several minutes.

i love my 5700le but i am goin to love my 6600gt even more when it gets here! lol

I know the 5700ultra that I have does pretty good.

But the 6600gt that im getting in a few days will be MORE fun

I was getting 9500 3dMark2001se points with my e-VGA 5700LE at default settings. After doing some minor mods (new heatsink/fan and ramsinks), and a bit of overclocking, I'm getting 12,680 3dMark2001se points. So the card is actually very good.

http://service.futuremark.com/compare?2k1=8418951

hpjtv said:

I was getting 9500 3dMark2001se points with my e-VGA 5700LE at default settings. After doing some minor mods (new heatsink/fan and ramsinks), and a bit of overclocking, I'm getting 12,680 3dMark2001se points. So the card is actually very good.

http://service.futuremark.com/compare?2k1=8418951

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Nice clocks you got there! I'm hoping to finish my mod by the end of the weekend. I have my Arctic Silver Adhesive in the mail coming to me atm.

MonroeM said:

Yes Swatdog, in theory you could "connect" pieces together, which probably wouldn't cool as well as one huge piece but it would work.

If you are afraid of losing your warranty by applying the ASA to your card, you could always buy thermal pads. If you do, make sure you get some by a reputible company. I'd give you a link... but honestly I'm not sure where you'd find just thermal pads w/o heatsinks (like most of them come w/).

Click to expand...

After hour of searching, here you go:
http://www.sidewindercomputers.com/shpc.html

They have others in different sizes also.

Well i finished my modding, I applied the HSs on the ram chips with the Arctic Silver Thermal Adhesive... I'm trying to OC, but the best I can go is 420/452 right now. I haven't tried setting my core any higher than that because I want my ram to go higher.

Should I wait until tomorrow and try again when this adhesive "burns in"?

Also, is there a certain pattern I should follow when using coolbits? I dont understand why I can make my RAM go 480 when the core is at stock speeds , but when I OC my core, I cant go past 452 on my RAM.

hpjtv, how did you achieve your speeds?

Well... I have bad news. My vid. card barely works now. I dont know WTF happened though. I OCed it to 420/452 and ran 3DMark2001SE. The first like 3-4 tests ran good, I was getting awesome FPS on the tests (alot better than before I OCed/modded it) but after the 5th (or so) test, my screen went black and I only saw little flickering dots/artifacts like the picture wanted to come through but cant fully. So I figured "OK, I OCed it too much..." so I restarted my computer thinking that it would work, but NOPE. When it was going through the BIOS, the only thing I saw were blue/grey vertical lines, and little flickering artifacts. Anyway, so this is when I realized that something was REALLY wrong and I started panicing. I pulled the card out, and felt the newly installed sinks and they were barely warm to the touch, same for the core. So I stuck it in my window to cool down (just to make sure).

Meanwhile, I ripped out my old 8MB card from one of my REALLY old systems and am currently using that. After I let the card cool down a bit, I tried to put it back in to see if it would work. I put it in and started the rig, I could see the BIOS loading (no more lines) but it seemed like there was alot of artifacts/particles still on the screen (particles were greenish), especially around the text. So anyway, it started to load windows and I could see the Windows XP loading screen, but when it finally initialized Windows, it went to a black screen for a few secs, and then my computer restarted.

Anyway, I dunno what to do now. I don't think I fried the card, because I think if I fried it completely it just wouldn't function. But something is wrong somewhere. The only thing that I can think of is when I applied the Arctic Silver Thermal Adhesive, I made sure to cover the surrounding circuits (little metal things around on the sides of the RAM chip) with Silicon as a precaution. But after the Adhesive dried I noticed that some got onto the silicon/metal. Last time I heard that ASTA is "Non-Electrically conductive".

I dont know what to do, any help would be awesome.....because right now i'm up s**t creek without a paddle.

I didn't actually overclock my core until I changed the crappy default heatsink/fan. I also lapped my new heatsink with a lapping kit to get a mirror finish. With that, I was able to get the core from 250MHz to 400MHz.

With the memory, I got some 1cm x 1.25cm ram sinks that are around 1.5cm high (not exact dimensions, sort of guessing since I don't have a ruler at hand). They have thermal adhesive pads at the bottom for attaching to the memory chips. With these, I can get the memory to 525MHz from 400MHz.

I also have a small fan blowing down the PCI/AGP area so that helps a bit with the memory cooling. I've also used the same ramsinks on all parts of my motherboard where it seems a bit warm (ie. 40 degrees Celcius and up).

Swatdog, it's possible you damaged your card by clocking the card core so high, especially if you are using the default heatsink/fan. The first time I overclocked this card, I blew my 350W power supply and had to replace it with a 450W one. Also, Artic Silver is not completely 100% non conductive since it is made from silver. Artic Alumina adhesive would probably work better. I'm only using Artic Silver Ceramique on my CPU.

Looks like you have the same motherboard as I. I'm sure you can overclock that alot higher. Just remember that socket 754 CPU's are bad for overclocking if you have more than 1 memory chip installed since the CPU only has 1 onboard memory controller. To get by this, either use 1 RAM chip or lower your RAM FSB ratio. I have mine at 166MHz and with my 50MHz overclock from 200MHz, the ram is running at around 208MHz.