Zalman heatpipe needs a fan if you plan to use ut on a 9700 pro, its
heavy and expensive too, and some people say that its not quiet
either.
Whether it _needs_ a fan depends on the case design and the airflow
through the case. As for being quiet, if there is no fan then what
is the noise source?
On all reviews i have read they recommend a fan on Zalman
heatpipe, because it gets very hot,
Without a fan of course it does. The question is whether it gets
hotter than the chip allows. Unfortunately ATI does not put the spec
sheets for their chips up on the Web site so we have no way of knowing
what the limit is for the R350.
Note, by the way, that the 9700 series boards had problems unrelated to
the CPU temperature--the cooling provided for the voltage regulators was
marginal. This issue would not be addressed by any heat sink attached
to the GPU chip.
Why? Put a big loud fan on it if overclocking is important to you.
It's not made for that though.
I changed to Artic
Cooling VGA Silencer, its cheap, has 2 speeds and makes no noice at
all in silent mode. Even at full speed its more quiet than stock fan.
Best of all is that my card runs cooler now and im only running this
cooler in silent mode all the time.
www.arctic-cooling.com/en/products/vga_silencer/
Site's busted. Only gives me the main menu and whines about Javascript
being busted. Using three different browsers on two different operating
systems.
