Do I need a fan for my VGA card?

Blakes550 · TweakNOOB Joined: 16 Apr 2003 Posts: 1

I have a 128mb Geforce 4 MX 440 video card. When i bought the card there was a heat sink on it. Today I bought a thermaltake VGA chipset fan and it still didn't fit....Does anyone have anz suggestions? Can i leave the the card with just the heat sink?...is the heat sink enuff to cool my card..oh yeah by the way i can^t get the heatsink out either...Is it cool to leave my grapics card with out a fan or do i neeed to buy another fan....

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[TN] Nathan · ALMIGHTY PWNER! Joined: 14 Feb 2002 Posts: 7406

Do you mean when you bought the card, it came with a heatsink with no fan on it right?

If you took off the heatsink altogether, I would not run the card. It will overheat and potentially ruin it.
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DMW · SirTweaksabit Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 457

yeah, I think that most of the MX series cards use passive cooling only....

Go to the nearest CompUSA and get the ThermalTake GF4 Copper cooler package...it is only around 12.99 (less than most internet places) and mine came with the memory heatsinks too.
http://www.compusa.com/products/product_info.asp?product_code=298859&pfp=BROWSE

As long as the maker is using an NVidia reference design PCB then the holes should line up!

or you could just slap a 40mm fan on top of the factory HS ( this was my solution back in the days of the 3dFX V3000)

DMW · SirTweaksabit Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 457

BTT...

did you resolve the issue?

I just wanted to follow-up on this because I discovered that not ALL of what I stated was accurate.
buy.com had a sale on GF4 MX420 AGP cards (there was a 45.00 rebate that brought the price down around 25.00 with free shipping) so I ordered one.

To my surprise this chipset looks ALOT like the GF2 setup. Knowing that the cooling was going to sans-fan when I opened the box, my intensions were to install the factory cooler from my MSI GF4 Ti4200 onto this card (I am using the Tt Copper Cooler on the MSI now).
It is nowhere even close to being able to fit. It does however appear that either of the "orb (crystal or blue)" chip coolers will fit nicely though. Both of these are also under 15.00 at most places.

my apologies for the mis-direction.

DMW

ricercar · Posted: Wed May 07, 2003 7:18 pm Post subject:

Answering to the original post, No. You don't need a fan on a GeForce4 MX GPU. Some GeForce4 MX cards come with only passive heat sinks, and some come with active (fan) heatsinks. You'll get more overclocking potential out of a GPU if you have a fan, but it's not required for normal operation of a GF4 MX.

DMW · SirTweaksabit Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 457

uhh... yeah, you'll see in my follow-up post that I corrcted myself.

ricercar · Posted: Wed May 07, 2003 9:11 pm Post subject:

Apologies. I missed that post entirely, somehow. My bad.
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ThunderChicken · Posted: Thu Oct 09, 2003 9:21 pm Post subject:

I've had the same card, excellent (:O) OCer..

Before when I had no money, I screwed an 80 MM case fan into the HS, the grooves are just big enough to latch on.

However, not I'm using the Vantec IceBerq4. Copper and well lapped active cooler (with blue LED light) and 4 copper RAMsinks. $23.00 CDN at my local shop.

With this setup I got a 40 MHz increase in core, and a 150 MHz increase in memory.

Suprises me, as I see top of the line cards usually 30-100 core and only 30 inc of memory..
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