Why not just create a fan profile instead?
Keeps the noise down without cutting plastic
I know, but the fans are really loud. I've read claims that Gigabyte used some old cheaper fans and/or from old models of its cards here, and they really don't inspire confidence once you look at them up close, hands on, physically. They're really begging to be cut out and replaced with something more serious and more silent.
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Have you noticed the vertical rather than horizontal ribbing on the heatsink?
My other idea to solve the problems with this cooling would be to actually block off the heatsinks on the mobo side (clog them) so that the air can't actually blow right back on the mobo but only in the opposite direction. Which currently means back to ambient, since my case wings are both off.
When I had the Gigabyte 7970 WindForce 3, 2 of the fans were bad. All I did was remove the entire fan shroud with the fans and added a pair of 120's on it with zipties. Werked like a charm and was heavenly quiet
Sounds like my plan. I'm also aware of the same thing having been done by at least one other guy before.
Remove the shroud by removing the little black phillips screws. Easy peasy. Be sure to save them when you decide to sell the card.
Wow! I saw the screwholes, but I thought it wasn't actually possible to reach them with a screwdriver on the ports side. Thanks for tipping me off, I'll try to remove the fan shroud non-destructively. I guess I don't need much more encouragement at this point. The only reason I was hesitating was due to the impossibility (as I thought) of removing the fan shroud without causing permanent damage.
Btw, I got 3 new replacement fans from Giga. Sold the card to a member here.
Out of curiosity, were those replacement fans from Giga better than the original ones?
And which 12cm fans did you use? I'm a little too inquisitive perhaps, but I tend to be careful with fans due to my hypersensitivity to vibrations and bearing sounds in general (this is something to do with the inner ear, which also affects one's balance, co-ordination etc., it runs in my family), so I try to do my intel before buying.
I already have some 12 cm fans here — a perfectly quiet Xilence that has served for years on an Accelero (with my Gigabyte HD4850, on which the stock cooler was a joke), and a relatively tolerable Scythe.
However, I also have two good 92cm fans here from Scythe that have
manual control (a resistor with a knob), and since my case wings are removed by default, it wouldn't be a problem to just manually crank up the speed for gaming, only a little exercise.
What I'm also contemplating right now is which direction to put the fans in: make them blow at the case floor (some 10 cms below) or make them blow up at the GPU and afterwards go out the case. I'm definitely gonna have better air intake from down there (could help it by putting a fan on my HDD rack and constructing a sort of channel that way, given the card's 30cm length) than from the GPU side.
I agree, fan profile. Unless you don't want to sell the card later.
Then, as Nebulous said.
I definitely am not selling. If the card is still alive when I'm getting my next card, I'll keep it for backup. I'm definitely going to have at least one old PC (this one, being replaced in several weeks or months), and my step-father, a retired IT technician, has a full apartment of old junk, and then there's by best buddy, so I'm sure between the three of us (we all live in the same apartment house) we could use some spare cards just in case, for when PCIE ones start dying.
So I don't worry about selling it really.
Besides, if the custom fans actually worked better than the stock cooling, I would be selling that on added value. Polish buyers of used hardware are not afraid of makeshift improvents by the previous owner.
