Arctic Cooling VGA Silencer not enough to cool a Radeon 9800pro All In Wonder?

[GnomeCop]

I attached an Arctic-Cooling VGA Silencer Revision 2 to my Radeon9800pro All In Wonder last night and it now seems to be suffering from weird artifacting in games.
So far every game displays weird stretching graphics. For instance, if a silver cup is on a table in Far Cry, there will be a silver bar stretching from the cup to the horizon.

I assume that the cooler is not adequately cooling the card, even when its set to high. On the windows desktop, the card peforms perfectly.

I attached the card according to the instructions with a thin layer of Arctic Silver 5, the metal shim around the chip was not removed.

Any ideas what it could be thats causing this? I made sure to clean off all traces of the silver thermal compound that was on there before. Its hard to believe that the tiny cooler on the card originally cools better than this bigass VGA Silencer.

 

[Cheetah8799]

I am cooling my 9800 Pro which is OC'd with the same cooler as you. Most reviews I've read say it's the best cooler on the market right now for OCing your ATI 9800 cards.


You may have installed it incorrectly. Do you have the back screw piece attached properly, and did you screw it in by alternating the screws as you went, instead of just one, then the other. I noticed on mine that screwing them down all the way would have broken my card, maybe you did yours too much, or too little. Or maybe one more than the other, thus causing it to sit funny.

My card also had the metal shim, I left it in place.

If you have any ram sinks, maybe they got knocked loose? I noticed on mine that two of the ram chips are hard to get at with the cooler in place. I was able to put on the ram sinks with the double-sided thermal tape, but I could see how they would get knocked loose if I had installed the vga silencer after installing the ramsink.

 

[GnomeCop]

I don't have any ram sinks on my card at all, never had any to begin with. I did however alternate screwing the screws in and didn't screw it in too tightly.

The instructions that came with the cooler were pretty clear about that. I will probably give it a couple more tries before I give up, but I'm still kind of worried. As long as the card isn't damaged (I don't see how I could have so far) then everything is OK.

 

[Cheetah8799]

Well, I suppose then if you did it all correctly, then maybe it just isn't fitting your card right and has poor contact with the chip.

Another thing I was thinking is that the ram directly under the cooler may be getting less airflow, and maybe because of that they are overheating.

I doubt this would make a difference, but have you tried it with the fan on "high" mode, as opposed to the low setting?

Other than that I'm stumped.

 

[GnomeCop]

yeah I leave it on high all the time.
I'll probably try to re-seat it again when I get home and try moving a few cards around. if not, then I need to find some new push pins to re install my stock cooler.

 

[screw3d]

Does the heatsink feel hot to you? If it's not a little too hot to touch after after like 10 seconds, it's probably not seated properly.

 

[Cosmo3]

If you take the VGA Silencer off use a straight edge and lay it across the gpu chip and see if you can slip a pice of paper between the shim and the straight edge. If not you may have to remove the shim. I had to remove a shim on a 9500 card I had but my new 9800 pro seems ok with the shim so check it out. Be very careful if you have to remove the shim as some have damaged their video cards trying to remove it.

 

[greendonuts3]

\\begin Stupid question for you:
You mention scraping off the old silver paste. Did you replace it w/ new?
//end Stupid question

 

[Wuzup101]

lol... yeah you definitely should replace it with new paste. No thermal pastes is a no-no no matter what chip/hsf unit. Put some AS5 on there and you should be good to go.

 

[KDKPSJ]

VGA Silencer is absoultely the best air-cooled HSF for Radeon 9x00 series. If you get the artifacts with Silencer, then you will get even more artifacts with stock cooler. Try re-apply thermal compound (I usually clean old thermal tape until I see shiny surface of VPU core) and re-install silencer. I hope you will get some results.

 

[Dman877]

Originally posted by: Cosmo3
If you take the VGA Silencer off use a straight edge and lay it across the gpu chip and see if you can slip a pice of paper between the shim and the straight edge. If not you may have to remove the shim. I had to remove a shim on a 9500 card I had but my new 9800 pro seems ok with the shim so check it out. Be very careful if you have to remove the shim as some have damaged their video cards trying to remove it.

On my 9700 Pro the shim was a few microns higher then the core so I had to thicken the layer of AS to get contect. I second cosmo's motion to check shim/core hieght.

 

[Nebor]

Originally posted by: Dman877

Originally posted by: Cosmo3
If you take the VGA Silencer off use a straight edge and lay it across the gpu chip and see if you can slip a pice of paper between the shim and the straight edge. If not you may have to remove the shim. I had to remove a shim on a 9500 card I had but my new 9800 pro seems ok with the shim so check it out. Be very careful if you have to remove the shim as some have damaged their video cards trying to remove it.

On my 9700 Pro the shim was a few microns higher then the core so I had to thicken the layer of AS to get contect. I second cosmo's motion to check shim/core hieght.

Wow, you have a micrometer?

 

[Dman877]

No, that was a guesstimate .

 

[Bad Dude]

I think you might need to remove the shim on the GPU as it raises the surface a little. Therefore, the silencer will not contact the GPU 100%. I would remove the shim. The new 9800Pro stock hs has a raise edge so it would contact the GPU better.

 

[bunker]

I had the same problem with my 9700 pro.

Being paranoid about cracking the core, I left the shim on and used a thicker layer of Arctic silver. works great now and even lowered my case temps by about 3 degrees.