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"Upgrading video card WITHOUT unvalidating warrenty"

check it out here

http://www.datadocktorn.nu/us_kortbyte1.php

c.b.

Right now I have:

Zalman Flower Heatsink on the CPU - fan turned right down.

Enermax dual fan 400W PSU - fans turned right down.

Zalman heatsink (not the heatpipe one) on a Geforce 3 (plain version), with a Zalman low noise fan above it turned right down.

An irritating fan over the North bridge. I have a Zalman heatsink for this, too, but so far I haven't had the guts to prise off the old heatsink so I could lose the fan.

The front fans on my Lian Li case turned right down.

The back and top fans not plugged in.

I'm not overclocking so this is enough cooling for me. The second fan over the graphics card adds quite a lot of noise to this setup so I'm going to try and thread the various cables out of a PCI slot and only plug it in when I'm gaming, which is not very often at the moment. I think I can get away with this. We'll see.

And nobody, but nobody is going anywhere near that case with any kind of power tool.

AMD_MAN wrote:
> You will never reache the amount of cooling a water cooling setup can
> do with a silent air cooled system.
>
> c.b.


Well duh, but water is so costly, dangerous and everybody's doing it!

Kernel: Zalman *urgh* the only piece of kit they make worth buying is the heatpipe. You fool :)

I'm a Zalman fanboy. I think their flower heatsinks are dead good, and at the time I bought it, it was the only piece of kit that could cool an Athlon quietly. I've seen others recently that look quite nice, but I doubt I'll change cooling until I do a total upgrade.

This air cooling with power tools intrigues me, though. It sounds like the kind of thing I'd like to try on somebody else's computer.

Dude :D

Seriously, there are better alternatives to flowers.

Here's the pitch: Heatsinks do not generate noise. At all. They are lumps of metal.

What does generate noise are the fans that blow onto the sinks. Now, the theory is, the more heat you CPU puts out, the better heatsink you're going to need to cool this. You also need a more power fan, power == noise.

So noise is only generated by fans, which need to spin so fast. But hang on, what if I get a better heatsink? Then I can run my fans slower!

Exactly.

The key is to get a really good heatsink, suck as the AX-7 and SLK-800 made by thermalright. These are the best heatsinks on the market. That include flowers. The fact is, flowers aren't that good. What they have going for them is their ability to accept 120mm fans.

120mm fans are great. They are quiet while providing large airflow.

This is the Zalman's only advantage, they can take 120mm fans easily. Other than that, as heatsinks go, they're pretty average.

So how do you get a 120mm fan onto your 80mm AX-7 or SLK-800? Well, this is where the power tools come in :D

Unfortunately, you can't really get a 120mm onto an SLK-800 without a deal of hassle. The AX-7 however, is pretty easy. I won't go into, but I'll run through the steps so you get the idea.

1. Make a 120mm fan adaptor. I'd recommend making one out of aluminium, as otherwise you're going to have to buy a plastic one from America or Australia, which aren't as good as home-made ones.

2. Bolt your 120mm fan to it.

3. Cut a blowhole in your case just above the fan, then use fan ducting to provide a direct link for the fan to the outside. This is masically because your heatsink+adaptor+fan doesn't have enough clearance most of the time. And anyway, why use warm internal air when you can get cold external?

4. Limit the speed of that fan, either via a baybus, FanMate or similar. Otherwise it will be a bit noisy.

And that's all there is to it!

You could probably use a Zalman fan bracket if you wanted and position it over the SLK/AX-7, but frankly the adaptor is SO much better.

http://www.sine-wave.net/stuff/heatpipe/8.html

A recent picture, including lovely heatpipe (which is really good btw).

Basically, you've been had :)

Turbonutter wrote:
> AMD_MAN wrote:
> You will never reache the amount of cooling a water cooling setup
> can
> do with a silent air cooled system.
>
> c.b.
>
>
> Well duh, but water is so costly, dangerous and everybody's doing
> it!

O.k. then get a prometia or a vapochill not everone is doing that (probably because of the stupid prices) i have seen a full water cooling kit with a cpu and northbridge block for £79.99 at Mapl*ns.

c.b.

Yeah, I'm considering Freon cooling considerably, except they units are just so damn ugly. I want one a neat unit that I can tuck away somewhere preferably.

OK, I now accept that there are better heatsinks on the market :(

I did go and check the prices of all this stuff at Overclockers (I guess I can mention this since SR aren't in the expensive heatsink business) and it turns out I got a pretty good deal on my flowers anyway: 2 for £40 on ebay. Suckers. So I'm not too upset. Really.

I may change when I do a proper upgrade, but under no circumstances am I cutting a hole in my case. It's too beautiful.

I'll definitely be heatpiping my Doom III graphics card though.

You should get a GeForce FX if you've got the momey. Also, I doubt you'll need (or could use) a Heatpipe for one of those.

I doubt I will have the money for an FX. I might be able to afford the card itself, but not the new CPU, motherboard and RAM that would make it worthwhile. I don't play PC games much these days, except for MAME and various old-school shoot-em-ups (Gridrunner++ is my favourite PC game this year, although I haven't played UT2003 yet), so it wouldn't be worth it. But then I really want to play Doom III, Deus Ex 2 and Broken Sword. Frankly I'm confused.

I've just installed water cooling with the ingenious method of using a hose to pump water into my PSU. You can see a waterfall cascading over the heatsink and DIMMs if you look through the case window, it's beautiful. Plus it'll overclock to buggery, although I'm having a few problems getting into the BIOS at the moment.

As soon as I get it running, I'll let you know what speed it'll clock to :OD