Gainward GF3 ti200 Cooling Mod

Easy cooling mode – Lichan Cheah

My brother owns a Gainward GF3 ti200, and one day he came to me complaining about how noisy and annoying the fan was. Considering that I had quieted down his case a lot (he uses a Sonata with a PAL6035 cooling his XP2000+), I assumed he had just not noticed the fan noise from before.

So I set about designing something that would be quieter, and as an upside, cool better. I was originally going to hack up my stock XP2100+ heatsink for the card, but a small resistor made that plan all but impossible (well possible, but with effort I didn’t have access to at the time.)

I scrounged around my ‘random parts’ drawer and came across a Zalman Passive Northbridge heatsink. Finding this piece, gave me an idea – why not copy Zalman themselves and mount the fan 90 degrees to the card, so that it would be blowing across the card.

So I fitted the NB heatsink and was then stuck with the dilemma of how to attach the fan to the card. Again, the parts drawer came in handy – I located two large, self tapping screws and screwed them through the fan and into the ramsinks, which were already glued to the card. Needless to say, I run the fan at 5v, and it is all but silent, whilst cooling the geforce 3 more than adequately. I have performed a similar mod to my own Hercules GF3 ti200.

Lichan Cheah – Australia