[O/C]Heatsink Improv: A Small Tribute to Overclockers of Old

[Overclockers.com]

Ever need a heatsink to cool that power hungry beast of yours? Is the stock cooling horrible and your GPU is without any good after market solutions? If so, then improvise. Jury rig that incompatible GPU cooler, find an unused CPU cooler you have tucked away, or even go all out and buy a CPU cooler for your GPU if there are no GPU specific solutions. No, I haven't lost my mind. This is just what runs through the mind of a bencher who is trying to squeeze every last drop of performance out of his GPU, but has no budget for extreme cooling.

Improvising with what you have, and experimenting wit... ... Return to article to continue reading.

 

[Just a nickname]

Great stuff!
I have a AC incompatible with my xfx 5870, the cooler isn't compatible for Rev2 board but this article gave me some ideas to adapt it on my board!

 

[MattNo5ss]

Awesome! Be sure to post pics

 

[azuza001]

I have got to know, didn't the heat melt the zip ties on that setup? that's what I would be afraid of, but thats a great idea.

 

[I.M.O.G.]

Nope, heatsinks don't get nearly hot enough to melt zipties.

 

[normalicy]

Love the article & you really hit the nail on the head. Customizing is what made building your PC great in the first place & is what is needed if we're going to keep people in the hobby. Guess I'm an old timer in the overclocking game since I've been doing it since the Celeron 300 (I did a Pentium 166, but that wasn't nearly as rewarding). I think my first real custom job was mounting a peltier between the heatsink & my Celeron 366 and indeed I've mounted a number of CPU heatsinks to GPUs. I can't bring myself to sacrifice every slot though. But more power to you if you do.

 

[MattNo5ss]

I have got to know, didn't the heat melt the zip ties on that setup? that's what I would be afraid of, but thats a great idea.

Sorry for the late reply, I was away for Thanksgiving and didn't realize you had posted. I.M.O.G. filled in for me though

There aren't any signs of melting on the zipties, and I doubt the heatsink will ever get hot enough to melt zipties. Your GPU would throttle or die if that much heat was on the heatpipes.

Love the article & you really hit the nail on the head. Customizing is what made building your PC great in the first place & is what is needed if we're going to keep people in the hobby. Guess I'm an old timer in the overclocking game since I've been doing it since the Celeron 300 (I did a Pentium 166, but that wasn't nearly as rewarding). I think my first real custom job was mounting a peltier between the heatsink & my Celeron 366 and indeed I've mounted a number of CPU heatsinks to GPUs. I can't bring myself to sacrifice every slot though. But more power to you if you do.

Thanks! You've been doing this a lot longer than I have. I started with an E6700 Conroe, and by the time I started, OCing was already pretty simple.

I didn't have to sac every slot, I could have installed the GPU in the bottom slot to free up the others. I don't use any other PCI/PCIe cards, so I just used the highest slot so I wouldn't have to make an extra support for the GPU/heatsink.

I'm guessing you've been a long time lurker since this is your first post, but have been registered for ~6 years. I'm glad my article coaxed that first post out of you

to the forums anyways!

 

[normalicy]

LOL, just saw this because I didn't have notifications turned on.

In fact, I've been lurking her for much longer, but didn't sign up for quite some time.

Yes, I did find the article invigorating due to the fact that it was hands on & unorthodox. Seems like everything these days is just buy whatever is available & bolt it on. No creativity or even experimentation. Just stagnation.

I find it funny that your first attempts at OCing are what I'd consider some of my most recent.

 

[DaveHCYJ]

The ram sinks you used reminds me of an old Socket 475 board I was having trouble with. I bought like 20 little ram sinks and stuck them to every single last chip, mostfet, etc. on the motherboard; it looked pretty crazy when I was done. That was back before motherboards really came with very much cooling aside from maybe something simple on the north and south bridges.

 

[MattNo5ss]

LOL, just saw this because I didn't have notifications turned on.

In fact, I've been lurking her for much longer, but didn't sign up for quite some time.

Yes, I did find the article invigorating due to the fact that it was hands on & unorthodox. Seems like everything these days is just buy whatever is available & bolt it on. No creativity or even experimentation. Just stagnation.

I find it funny that your first attempts at OCing are what I'd consider some of my most recent.

I love seeing people's ideas and experiments, it's a shame there are many out there nowadays (other than case mods).

I'm definitely new to OCing, relatively speaking. I still push Conroes for our benching team, in fact I bought two Conroes in the past 2 weeks, an E6400 and E6600

The ram sinks you used reminds me of an old Socket 475 board I was having trouble with. I bought like 20 little ram sinks and stuck them to every single last chip, mostfet, etc. on the motherboard; it looked pretty crazy when I was done. That was back before motherboards really came with very much cooling aside from maybe something simple on the north and south bridges.

Those sinks just came with the MK-13. I bet your old board looked like a heatsink forest. No pics left over?