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passivly cooled geforce 4

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namgorf

Member
Joined
Jul 13, 2002
Location
Texas
I recently decided to build a few extra computers from my spare parts, and one of my spare parts happened to be a Gainward GeForce 4 Ti4200 128MB AGP 4x card. The fan was dying a slow death, seems dust had gotten into it and over time the bearings were screaming.

When I used that card I guess I didn't mind, or was too busy downloading off napster or whatever the hell I was doing back then to care, but today it's entirely too noisy.

Solution: Take 1 giant Coolermaster P4 Copper Heatpipe cooler and some thermal adhesive and shut the thing up.

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This ******* is huge, and takes up like 3 slots now.

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It's also pretty damn weighty.

The Geforce 4 GPU has no internal thermal diode, so I'll never know the real temps, but the unit is cool to the touch, and displays no rendering anomalies.

Originally I was going to drill through the block and use springs and such, but I decided to get lazy.

the surface of the geforce4 gpu is a good size, so it's got a good grip using just the arctic alumina thermal adhesive. I put on a clean even coat, and let it cure for 48 hours with weights on it.

The agp slot has a hardcore lock on it, and the case itself has a latch to lock the card and provide support.
 
Being passively cooled, and glued on already, just slide a probe into the fins to get as close to the core as you can. Even if it is the PSU probe- just measure PSU RPM for a general idea of temp health. Looks good to me and I'm sure that even with a slight breeze inside the case from the lower-front intake fan, you'll keep it nice and cool.
 
I used an enermax temp sensor from an old breakout box I had. I placed it through the fins and flush to the heatsink block, temps were 35c under load, so that seemed to work well.

It hasnt locked up or shown any signs of naughtiness.
 
namgorf said:
I used an enermax temp sensor from an old breakout box I had. I placed it through the fins and flush to the heatsink block, temps were 35c under load, so that seemed to work well.

It hasnt locked up or shown any signs of naughtiness.

Sounds like you got that thing tamed! :) WTG :)
 
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