- Joined
- Jul 15, 2005
Hey guys! In my quest for more adequate GPU cooling, I've had a long journey. Note that if you're in a hurry or don't want to hear the tale of my video card's cooling, you can skip the next two paragraphs and cut to the chase with me 
.
It all started when the MSI 60mm fan on my PCI-E 6600GT started to buss eraticly. I contacted MSI about it, and they sent me a new HSF unit in the mail free of charge. Very nice of them. There was a cm^2 of white thermal junk on the HSF they mailed me (it was covered by a small plastic box thing), but the memory area was devoid of paste. Now granted, they sell 7800s without any RAM sinks, but I just couldn't stand to have my memory having a bad thermal interface! So I put some AS5 on the memory chips (after cleaning up the old thermal stuff from all of the memory chips and the GPU core itself), and I applied the heatsink. Hurrah.
At that point, I had two stock heatsinks, one with a messed up fan, and another on my 6600GT. Now noise was still a concern with this fan; those 60mm fans really need to spin to cool well. I took the original heatsink (MSI said I could keep it) and ripped off the plastic thing on top of the fins, as well as the busted 60mm fan (I actually unscrewed them, but ripped out is more dramatic). Then I lapped it (rather badly, but it was better than no lapping---there was a wierd powder coating on the heatsink) and slapped it onto my 6600GT with a 7v'd 92mm fan blowing down on it.
Now we come to today. Inspired by tales of desktop HSFs being modified to cool video cards, I went out to the used computer store about a mile from my house (actually there's a long story here---if you want to hear it ask) and bought the four best-looking heatsinks around, with my memory and GPU core in mind. What I want is suggestions as to which ones I should utilize (maybe chopping one up with my dremmel for memory cooling) in what fashion, or any other advice on the matter.
The plan is to clean them up, lap the GPU core one, lap the memory one, cut up the memory one, drill holes in bottom of the core one that match the holes in the 6600GT, and put a bolt through this hole, through a rubber washer, through the card, through another rubber washer, and finally through a bolt (except x2 because there are two mounting holes). As for attaching the sinks to the memory, I'd prefer to somehow attach them to the core one, rather than gluing them to the memory chips themselves (and just use a little AS5 on the memory). Obviously this is up for suggestions.
So let's take a look at the relevant pics.
There you can see my current GPU cooling, the tops of the new heatsinks, and their bottoms. I got two of the top one (with the black fan mount on it), just because it looked effective, and they had two of them. $1 each. The only thing I know about them is the bottom/right one. It had two lables on it with product numbers, both of which indicated it was used to cool a Gateway PIII 866MHz at some point in its poor poor existance. Those numbers were 4500658 and 2511656.
Thank you all for any help, especially those of you who have done this mod yourselves.
.It all started when the MSI 60mm fan on my PCI-E 6600GT started to buss eraticly. I contacted MSI about it, and they sent me a new HSF unit in the mail free of charge. Very nice of them. There was a cm^2 of white thermal junk on the HSF they mailed me (it was covered by a small plastic box thing), but the memory area was devoid of paste. Now granted, they sell 7800s without any RAM sinks, but I just couldn't stand to have my memory having a bad thermal interface! So I put some AS5 on the memory chips (after cleaning up the old thermal stuff from all of the memory chips and the GPU core itself), and I applied the heatsink. Hurrah.
At that point, I had two stock heatsinks, one with a messed up fan, and another on my 6600GT. Now noise was still a concern with this fan; those 60mm fans really need to spin to cool well. I took the original heatsink (MSI said I could keep it) and ripped off the plastic thing on top of the fins, as well as the busted 60mm fan (I actually unscrewed them, but ripped out is more dramatic). Then I lapped it (rather badly, but it was better than no lapping---there was a wierd powder coating on the heatsink) and slapped it onto my 6600GT with a 7v'd 92mm fan blowing down on it.
Now we come to today. Inspired by tales of desktop HSFs being modified to cool video cards, I went out to the used computer store about a mile from my house (actually there's a long story here---if you want to hear it ask) and bought the four best-looking heatsinks around, with my memory and GPU core in mind. What I want is suggestions as to which ones I should utilize (maybe chopping one up with my dremmel for memory cooling) in what fashion, or any other advice on the matter.
The plan is to clean them up, lap the GPU core one, lap the memory one, cut up the memory one, drill holes in bottom of the core one that match the holes in the 6600GT, and put a bolt through this hole, through a rubber washer, through the card, through another rubber washer, and finally through a bolt (except x2 because there are two mounting holes). As for attaching the sinks to the memory, I'd prefer to somehow attach them to the core one, rather than gluing them to the memory chips themselves (and just use a little AS5 on the memory). Obviously this is up for suggestions.
So let's take a look at the relevant pics.
There you can see my current GPU cooling, the tops of the new heatsinks, and their bottoms. I got two of the top one (with the black fan mount on it), just because it looked effective, and they had two of them. $1 each. The only thing I know about them is the bottom/right one. It had two lables on it with product numbers, both of which indicated it was used to cool a Gateway PIII 866MHz at some point in its poor poor existance. Those numbers were 4500658 and 2511656.
Thank you all for any help, especially those of you who have done this mod yourselves.
)
