Cooling a Radeon 9700 - with a 1U copper heatsink?

[Jeff7]

I've been using a heatsink like this to cool my Geforce4 Ti4200 card. Would something like this be better than the standard cooling that a Radeon 9700 comes with? I realize that the RAM will likely use heatsinks then too, which isn't a problem. I have plenty of old Pentium heatsinks that I can just slice up and attach to the RAM. What's everyone's thoughts on this?
Oh yeah, and one other question - around the Radeon GPU's core, are there 4 holes in the circuit board? Here are some pics of the current cooler on the Geforce4; I'm hoping I can just remove it from the GF4 and attach it to the Radeon 9700 (when I get one, which should be in less than 2 weeks hopefully).

 

[Curley]

I'm cooling mine with a socket 7 cooler. My Maya II would really heat up and the fan on these .15micron chips are inadequate to cool the beast. I also made some heatsinks for the back of the card since the GigaByte Maya II 9700 doesn't have any. I used some Arctic Silver Epoxy to put the heatsink on. I was really worried about getting some on the wrong parts. Anyway, I ended up with a very cool card that is barely warm to the touch on a full load. It does however take up two PCI slots. But I will tell you my overclock on this card is unbelieveable. If this card had come with a wind tunnel cooler like the GeforceFX, we would have seen much higher default clock speeds on the Radeon 9700 Pro.

Good Luck.

 

[Jeff7]

Nuts - in the picture showing the back of the card, I don't see all the holes I need. This copper heatsink I've got is fairly heavy, and very smooth on the bottom. I don't think that epoxy would hold it on very well.

 

[Curley]

Originally posted by: Jeff7
Nuts - in the picture showing the back of the card, I don't see all the holes I need. This copper heatsink I've got is fairly heavy, and very smooth on the bottom. I don't think that epoxy would hold it on very well.

Let's put it this way, when you use the epoxy, make sure you don't want to replace your heatsink, because you will probably rip off the GPU doing it.

 

[Jeff7]

Ok, I see that you used Arctic Silver Epoxy. I use Arctic Silver and epoxy when I attach heatsinks - some ASII in the middle, with some regular 2-part epoxy on the corners. I figure that way, the Arctic Silver can work undiluted by epoxy. And I'm not entirely sure I'd want to attach this thing permanently anyway. I just don't want to let my work go away I guess - I had to custom build a mounting system for this heatsink. It uses bolts similar to an Alpha 8045's mounting system - it holds it on the card quite well, but it is removable.

 

[Curley]

True

 

[Jeff7]

Aaaaah crap; looks like I'll need to either figure out an entirely new mounting system, or else....don't know what to do then. I checked reviews of several different Radeon 9700 cards, and there's only two offset holes to accept those little plastic clippy things.
The copper 1U cooler is quite nice actually - it keeps the core cool, and it takes up only the first PCI slot, plus the fan has RPM monitoring.
Man, don't know what to do now...got to think about this one awhile. I really don't want to use epoxy on anything large and heavy like this - I'm not known to have good coordination at all, and the last thing I'd need to do is bump the cooler. The extra leverage of its size, and its weight would not be kind to the epoxy joints, and that could possibly damage the chip. And I just don't want the cooler to be permanently attached. So either a new mounting type, or a different kind of heatsink, but what kinds are there really? There's the usual fan-over-heatsink, there's the fan embedded in the heatsink, and there's nVidia's "dustbuster" design. The fan embedded in the heatsink seems to be a bit inefficient, as the fan's hub is right over the hottest part of the chip - that, and the center of the heatsink is just flat metal, no fins.

 

[xSauronx]

seems like i read a review recently of a heatpiped heatsink on a 9700, maybe it was made by zalman...
ahhh, not a review, but the product itself

Zalman ZM80

interesting, no time to find the review right now, but iirc, it got warm, but considering it doesnt have a fan thats expected, tho it did rather well i think....anyway

 

[Jeff7]

I saw that, but...seems a tad expensive....guess there's not much chance of getting one used on the forums. I do have a 120mm fan blowing across the expansion cards - that should help the passive Zalman heatsink I suppose. I just haven't seen any reviews of it to see how it'd compare to an active heatsink of similar thickness; guess I'll have to check around.