What to do about graphics card cooling

DinkyDogg_

I have a HIS Excalibur Radeon 9800 Pro 128mb DDR IceQ graphics card (what a mouthful!). Info here: http://www.hisdigital.com/html/iceq9800_pro.htm

I bought it before I really knew that I could liquid cool my graphics card, but it was expensive and now I'm stuck with it. It has a huge heatsink and fan for the core which blows the hot air out of the PCI slot under the AGP. However, the memory has just tiny little heatsinks adhesived on. The heatsinks are all just adhesived on- So I can't remove them and liquid cool it. I have a Koolance (info: www.koolance.com) cooling system, and they have coolers for the radeon series cards, but they don't reccomend using it for replacing heatsinks attached only with adhesive.

I've overclocked the core a lot, and the memory only a tiny bit. I don't get artifacts with any of the games I play.

What would you reccomend? I don't really have enough cash to splurge for an awesome new card. What should I do? It galls me that I can't liquid cool maybe hte most important part of my gaming comp. [/url]

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Ham_fisT · Posted: Thu Nov 25, 2004 6:41 am Post subject:

I have this same card, why do you need to water-cool it? it runs pretty quiet even with the fan on high, plus, all the warm air is leaving the case anyway

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FreeTheRock [banned] · Posted: Thu Nov 25, 2004 11:39 am Post subject:

i too have the card and its amazeing.

DinkyDogg_ · Posted: Thu Nov 25, 2004 12:01 pm Post subject:

I don't know, I really want to water cool it. Especially the memory :-/ I guess my urge to water cool it is kind of stupid.... but I feel like since I got this spiffy liquid cooling system I should at least be able to cool my vid card!

Josh · Posted: Thu Nov 25, 2004 6:59 pm Post subject:

Weaze is the guy to ask on Water cooling your graphics card....hes spills a bit too

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Ham_fisT · Posted: Thu Nov 25, 2004 8:25 pm Post subject:

That urge is NOT stupid

Just do some research, and measuring, I'm sure you can find a waterblock to fit the core, but I wouldn't risk a $235.00 card trying to take the heatsinks off of the Memory

some of those "Thermal Epoxies" are pretty strong, it would sux0r to pull off a memory chip tryin' to get them off

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Hoedizzy

DinkyDogg_ · Posted: Thu Nov 25, 2004 10:40 pm Post subject:

I upped the memory as high as I could without getting artifacts... It wouldn't let me up it much at all. Guess those little heatsinks don't cool it too well. Maybe I'll get in touch with weaze, but I really can't think of what I could do. It would really suck to mess up the card by trying to pry off any of the heatsinks.

[KoG]^weaZel · Posted: Sun Nov 28, 2004 11:09 am Post subject:

Thanks for the referral Josh.

If you are wanting to watercool your graphics card and you plan on using the a Koolance waterblock you arent going to be water cooling the memory anyways. As all that they have are gpu blocks. The only place that I know that makes waterblocks that include the memory is Innovatek.

http://www.frozencpu.com/cgi-bin/frozencpu/ex-blc-61.html

With using one of those you would have to remove the heatsinks from the memory. Which if they are just epoxied on can be hazardous to the video card (to remove them). But if you are just going to use a waterblock on the gpu it may not be necessary to remove the memory heatsinks to install the gpu waterblock. That is unless they would interfere with the installation of the waterblock.

Ham_fisT · Posted: Sun Nov 28, 2004 11:30 am Post subject:

Actually, the fan on the GPU doesn't cool the memory at all, the Arctic Cooling unit directs air over the GPU heatsink, and out the PCI slot.
watercooling the memory would be extra fun because there are memory chips on both sides of the card

(cooling half of the memory would make no sense) you can probably find waterblocks for both sides, but I haven't looked

putting a waterblock on the GPU might help with memory cooling tho, since removing the stock heatsink would uncover the memory heatsinks and allow for more airflow to reach them, an intake fan in the side door works great for this

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