GF4 and Zalman cooler

[Splontoon]

Hi all,

I have a PNY Verto GF4 TI4600 graphics card and the fan on it has an
annoying habit of spinning faster after approx 10mins. Before this happens
my PC is relatively quiet but when the fan spins faster you can really
notice the noise increase.

So I have been looking at replacing the fan with a some form of fanless
heatsink. I came accross the Zalman ZM80A-HP which looks like it will do the
job but I am wondering if anyone is using one of these on this particular
card and how good it is, or even if it fits ok.

Thanks for any help.

 

[kony]

Hi all,

I have a PNY Verto GF4 TI4600 graphics card and the fan on it has an
annoying habit of spinning faster after approx 10mins. Before this happens
my PC is relatively quiet but when the fan spins faster you can really
notice the noise increase.

So I have been looking at replacing the fan with a some form of fanless
heatsink. I came accross the Zalman ZM80A-HP which looks like it will do the
job but I am wondering if anyone is using one of these on this particular
card and how good it is, or even if it fits ok.

Thanks for any help.

If a fan starts getting noisey due to vibration, wear, loss of
lubricant, it's good to replace it. However, from your description it
could instead be that the card has thermal monitoring, and
intentionally increases fan speed when the card gets hotter.

Unless the original fansink was very poor, it likely does a better job
of cooling the card than any passive 'sink like the Zalman can ever
hope to. If the manufacturer decided that the card needs more
cooling, I don't think it wise to instead provide the card with LESS
cooling.

As for who makes quiet VGA coolers, I don't know... I have drawerfulls
of old heatsinks and find just about any old pentium heatsink with low
RPM fan or "average" fan running at 5-7V (by an adapter or inline
resistor) works well and is quiet, inexpensive. Well, for me it's
free, since as i wrote, there are plenty of old heatsinks sitting
around.


Dave

 

[Gary Hegan]

I am using one and it does a great job cooling. The reason it does is that
my two intake case fans at bottom are blow air right over the heatsink so it
helps a lot to have good air flow in your case when your card is running in
3D mode.

 

[Splontoon]

I have one intake fan at the base of my case and no obstructions between
that and the cards. I've moved all my PCI cards to the bottom and left the
card slot covers off at the back of the case, so hopefully the air blown
over the GF4 card will be carried outside of the case.

Temp wise my system is relatively cool at the moment under stress so I think
I'll give this cooler a go.

Thanks for you advice!

 

[Groove]

Splontoon said this...

Temp wise my system is relatively cool at the moment under stress so I
think I'll give this cooler a go.

I have one replacing the grotty fan on my ti4200. I placed a case fan to blow
over the Zalman unit to help the cooling and so far everything seems to be
going great. No hickups, lockups or artifacts even when gaming hard so I'm
fairly confident it's working OK.