After Market 5850 Heatsinks

ksherman

Senior member
Jul 9, 2000
619
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www.kshermphoto.com
Just ordered me a 5850. Probably not going to be excited about the noise of the retail HS/F on the 5850, any chance of a quieter and cooler after market option? would have liked a Vapor-X, but then I'd have to get a 400+ card and wait for stock...
 

Painman

Diamond Member
Feb 27, 2000
3,728
29
86
VF1000 apparently fits w/o modding, just use stock plate for cooling the RAM and VRM...

Some dude @ XS took pics of his, you can take a look - pics are on that page of the thread.
 

bigriggg

Member
Nov 7, 2009
69
0
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i think the stock fan is actually quiet on mine compared to my 8800gt i had. at idle it doesnt even spin, and if you over clock it 10% or so, the fan idles at 20%. still not loud
 

bunnyfubbles

Lifer
Sep 3, 2001
12,248
3
0
The stock fan was easily the noisiest thing in my rig, those who think its quiet have noisy rigs and/or live in noisy environments.

The S1 works wonders yet again, but does require some modding for ideal performance

With a 120mm fan strapped to it (one of the mods), my temps idle at 26C and load at 49C with those "power viruses". Games will generally load around 41-43C (this is stock clocks and volts, I haven't pushed my card yet because I ran in to a fiasco where I thought I might have killed my card, so I'm still a bit timid to fiddle with her again just yet, although I'm sure things are perfectly fine, at any rate its obvious I have plenty of room to spare when I finally do overclock).

The other mods include bending a few fins to avoid the extended DVI ports (an incredibly easy mod) and bending some fins to avoid part of the base plate that sticks up (a bit trickier as you have to know which fins would get in the way).

And I would definitely recommend using the base plate with whatever aftermarket cooler you use, the VRMs are actually the weakest link for me (and I would wager they would be for anyone with better than stock cooling), and the base plate will cool these far better than the dinky stick-on garbage that will likely be included with any after market cooling (including the S1).

I ran into trouble both before using the base plate, and after. Before using the base plate my VRMs were getting waaaayyyy too hot. So I decided to try and put the base plate back on. Problem was its connected to the plastic heatsink shroud by these super tiny screws and I ended up stripping them out of impatience (using too large a screwdriver). After I was able to drill the stripped screws out, I had the base plate, but I had damaged some of the stock thermal pads. So I reused some old thermal pads to replace them but either I didn't remount the base plate properly or the old thermal pads were garbage, because the card would quit working on my and shut my system down periodically, and eventually the VRM temps stopped showing up in GPU-Z. So I unistalled the base plate again and just used a small dab of Arctic Silver Ceramic on each of the VRM chips (the thermal pads for the RAM were perfectly fine) and reinstalled the base plate and that did the trick, the card works perfect again.

Just thought I'd share. All of my troubles were due to personal negligence caused by impatience and inexperience (never did I expect the VRMs to be that demanding). If I did it again, I'd make sure to have a proper sized screw driver to begin with, and I'd probably strip and clean off the VRM thermal pads and apply Ceramique right away.