9700 pro mod

[Evdawg]

I was having problems with my 9700 overheating, i took the sink off, and saw that there was BARELY any paste... so i added some AC3 and i shined/buffed the bottum of the sink till i could see myself... =) I had a small 40mm fan i think it*maybe 50?* that i took, and screwed onto the sink. Hooked it up to my power supply, and i havnt had a lockup from overheating since. If someone wants to host the pics i have them. Its a cheap, and easy mod and can be done very quickly and safely

 

[Goi]

Nice work. I modded my 9700 Pro too, but what I found was the exact opposite - globs of thermal paste but it wasn't making much contact due to the copper shim being not flush with the actual core. Anyway I modded a Cooljag 1U cooler onto it so that its flush, and its running cooler now. I also added ramsinks.

Would appreciate some pictures of your mod though. I have mine here

 

[Evdawg]

where did you find those ram sinks?

 

[Creig]

It looks like he removed the passive GPU heatsink from a Radeon VE, stripped the paint from it, cut it into squares and attached them to the memory chips of the 9700.

 

[Goi]

Nope, I didn't. I bought those ramsinks at a local electronics/hardware shop. It comes preapplied with thermal tape so its convenient. I had to cut some of them up with a hacksaw to get them down to size though, which is why you see them in 2 different sizes.

 

[Creig]

Ah. They look identical in design to the heatsink on the VE so I figured you cannibalized it. I've done that a few times with old heatsinks that I've replaced with chrome orbs.

 

[Goi]

Hehe, they only look identical perhaps due to the size/angle of the shots. They're actually quite a bit different. The Radeon VE's HSF is much tighter with a denser pin arrangement than the cheapo ramsinks.

 

[Lonyo]

Goi, what type of RAM chips do you have? BGA?
I'm tepted to hack up an old TNT2 heatsink I have then stick it on my 9800 when it arrives, using some thermal tape, did you get much of a boost from it?
The TNT2 heatsink looks almost exactly the same as that Radeon VE heatsink.
And is it best to have heatsinks on the front and back? Or could it be OK with just sinks on the front?

Have you rigged up any extra cooling (like a fan blowing over the sinks) or anything like that, or is it just sinks?
And how much more did the new heatsink allow you to push the core? (If you overclocked)

Looks pretty nice.

Evdawg: check this pic hosting site. It's basically a pic hosting site for Anandtech forums.

 

[Goi]

The topic states "9700 pro mod", so what do you think?
Yes its BGA, all 9700 Pros have BGA memory. Ramsinks don't help much in overclocking, but they help keep the temps down.

I have heatsinks wherever there are hot chips, in my case the R300 core and the BGA memory. While its also a good idea to cool the underside of the chip, there's no real surface to attach a heatsink to.

I have a 120mm side intake fan running at 7V to cool my PCI/AGP cards as well as maintain some ventilation in the case. In addition the rest of my case fans are also doing their job.

 

[Evdawg]

hey thanks for the pic hosting site lonyo, got some pics for you here.

Link1
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Link4

 

[Goi]

Someone has shaky hands

But thanks for sharing anyway, nice big heatsink