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The poor man's video cooler.

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Celeron_Phreak

Member
Joined
Mar 28, 2003
Here is a pic of my video card fan:


vidcooler.JPG



Of coarse I have a medium sized heatsink on the video chipset that gets fairly warm, RAM sinks on the top that stay warm, and RAM sinks on the bottom that like to stay cool. I'll have more pix up soon. But this is my idea of the poor man's cooler. Ever since the fan died on it's heatsink a week or two ago, I've been left to use this. But hey, whatever works. Right?

C.P.
 
Haha. I just knew someone was going to say that :). But yes, I suppose it is. I originally built that thing for my Voodoo 3 3000, but I didn't have the card long enough to use it on it. As I like to say, ghetto is the way :D.
 
Azeroth said:
That doesn't look too bad, you even used two of em to reinforce it.

hehe and they are even spraypainted black! :) which reminds me that i gotta spray my zip drive face...

the real question is how well does it work?
 
It works just as good, if not better, than having the fan on the heatsink itself, since I can use a bigger/more powerful fan. Overall performance is pretty nice though :).

I had to use two of those back plate things on this caues just one wouldn't hold up, no matter how tight I made the screw. The fan would pull it down and it'd fall. I like it though. Give the inside of my case some pozaz
 
i use something almost exactly as that.
i use a 80mm fan with variable speed control attached similierly blowing onto my 9700 and hopefully cooling some mosfets and caps on the mobo as well.

i know microcenter used to sell these just for this purpose and were like $20 a while ago.

its a good idea for me as i dont use case fans and have h20 so i need some airflow i dont have a sidepanel ever so case fans are kinda a waste and i just do this and i get all the airflow i need and exactly where i need it.

btw im gonna download the webcam software and take a pic of mine. ill post it here as it is worth sharing and this is a good thing to do.
004_image211.jpg
 
Last edited:
deathstar13, did you paint your video card's RAM sinks black, or did you buy them that way?
 
Celeron_Phreak said:
deathstar13, did you paint your video card's RAM sinks black, or did you buy them that way?
no they came that way as it began life as a gpu heatsink and i used my dremel to cut them.

ive found dremels to be an ocers best friend :D
 
Dremel? I used a regular metal saw and it worked pretty well too. Aluminum heatsinks aren't very hard.
 
but i use it for so much more like side panels and blow holes.
yes the hacksaw will do it also.but im allergic to sweat and manual work :D
 
yar - I did something just like that too - I just have one pci slot cover though - cause then you can bend or twist it really easy to get the airflow where you need it
 
Nice to know I'm not the only one :p. Damian, that would work nice for me too, in fact that's exactly what my GPU cooler used to be! But yeah, I'd put a fan back on my GPUsink, if I had a working fan that is ;).
 
Almost like the bracket Zalman uses for thier CPU fan coolers... Truely ghetto.. but again, if it works, why not! Heck, I had zipties holding on the HSF on a K6-2 :p
 
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