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Just watercooled my Radeon 9700Pro

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BrianH2O

Member
Joined
Aug 19, 2002
It cools quite well. I am getting 32c during load (playing AvP2 expansion pack and 3dmark2k1). I was getting 52c with air cooling. I love water cooling!

I am going to try to watercool the memory on the 9700 next ...I have a plan.... Memory is too hot to touch for long!

So far my temps are

Amb ......... 22c
Water .......25c (using Compunurse)
CPU ..........31c (full load with F@H, using MBM)
GPU ..........32c (using Compunurse)

Chipset on air cooling @ 34c
 
First try was 350Mhz for the core. The memory of the video card will not exceed 330Mhz.

Actually, I think my card is a very poor OC'er. But I have managed a 16,100 in 3Dmark2001
 
BrianH2O said:
First try was 350Mhz for the core. The memory of the video card will not exceed 330Mhz.

Actually, I think my card is a very poor OC'er. But I have managed a 16,100 in 3Dmark2001

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the card default at 325/325?

If so that is one hell of a disappointment considering it's watercooled. :(
 
I'm getting a Radeon 9700 and I'm gonna water it just like you do.
Was it easy to install the block? what block do you use?
Dose it have the same mounting as GF4?
I'm currently set on buying either Dangerden's cooler or the new Swifttech mcw50 which was release a few days ago.
 
grunjee

The defaults are 325/310. I got to 350/330. The memory is running very hot. I have noticed in alot of other reviews that, without cooling, thier limit was also 330. I am hoping to design a watercooling system for the memory as well. I f I can get the card to run at 360/360, I would be happy.

SBeaver

Yes, I am using the DD Gforce 4 cooler. They have the hold for both the GF3 and GF4. Use the GF3 holes and it will work find.
 
I can't get my memory up past 321 on my 9700. I probably got unlucky with the memory on my card but even so that is barely any oc at all. The gpu ocs very nice though ;)
 
Just ran a 3dmark @ 360/330... Maybe there is still some hope for this card yet. Here is my 3dmark score of 16461 :beer:
 
guys dont frusterate the guy, who cares if it doesnt overclock high, its no big deal "oh your card sucks" thats not a way to look at it man!
thats pretty cool you got that set up and all,
how do you plan on cooling the mem?
 
Yes, the memory do seem to get rather hot on the 9700. I can get 333MHz on mine, with a couple of MHz "safezone". I get the impression that it is no point in pushing the core a lot farther than the memory. In 3DMark things get "choppy" if I push the core over about 350MHz. I tried 365 at the highest. It could of course have something to do with the overclocking to do too. But I don´t have watercooling on it, yet. So I was not very comfortable with pushing the card anyway. 349/333 is wat I use until I get a waterblock and some ramsinks on it.

BrianH2O, you seem to be pretty hard on putting watercooling on everything. It will be very interesting to see what you make for watercooling the memory! :)
 
I certainly wasn't trying to be harsh by what I said, and I certainly don't want to discourage the guy from going all out.

It just seems to me that if you take a top of the line card, and add to it some watercooling, you should be able to reach some mad OC speeds. That evidently isn't the case, and that's no fault of BrianH2O's. If it were me though I might be somewhat disappointed, just considering the effort involved vs. the gains. But heck, I'm sure the OC he's gotten will translate into more fps and higher 3d2k1 scores.
 
Here's what I am thinking for the memory....

- Split the output from the DD GF4 block into 2. I have 2 Y's that take the 1/2" and splits the flow into 2 x 1/2" and use the second Y for the return flow.

- reduce the tubing size to 3/8" to increase flow rate

- I now have two flows, the first will go to the front 4 chips and the second will go to the side 4 chips

- the actual memory "blocks" I am thinking of using will be a 1/2" copper end cap. I will lapp the bottoms a bit. Then I will connect two together end caps (ie over 2 chips on 1 side) with a solid copper 3/8" OD tubing. Inside end end cap I will glue down a heatsink. I have a bunch of Tweakmonster BGA's with AS Alum Adhesive should do the trick. I will glue the 2 endcaps to a small piece of Lucite with an elbow and nozzle fot 3/8" tubing. I will need four like this.

- Using a clamp of some kind (I still have to figure this out) attach the "blocks" to the memory and clamp them down with AS Alum.

- Connect 1 of the splits above to one bottom nozzle. Connect the other bottom nozzle to the top nozzle. Use the last top nozzle to return flow to a combination Y

- do the same on the other side.

Any one understand this?? A friend and I both water cool and he thinks it is also possible to get this to work.

Any suggestion?? Comments?? Think I am nuts??
 
not really... do you have a link to yoru card with pics? i would like to see what your planning on cooling...
 
No I do not have pic's. I am still in the concept state. I will try to get some thing drawn or better yet, get in done in a week or two

Sorry
 
No matter how you do it, having watercooling in the mem chips is going to be very hard, it will reduce performance of the cooling of your other things, all those small ramblocks will need tubing in between and that's a lot of short tubes which increases your chances a lot to get leakage.
Then to actually achive anything with this obsessive watering you will need of course to do a volt mod on the memory (maybe you did that allready?) to get in anywhere.
Cooling something like a cpu which gives out a lot of heat is justified, a GPU could be too, but I think this will get you nowhere.
I think the only way you can get a good mem speed is to simply buy a very high quality card with very good memory and then voltage mod it.
 
watercooling a 9700 is quite a bit more hard than a GF4: there is a lot of capacitors between the memchips that are higher than the BGAchips
so u have to plan very well your blocks ;) and do small holes in the cold plate :)
 
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