Cooling a VGA card without HS or fan?

[JesseKnows]

I found a couple of VGA cards in the computer store dumpster, one a Geforce2 MX and one a TNT2. The GPU chip looked very clean, no sign of paste or glue. There are no through holes in the card for mounting a HS/F. I ran the card and the chip got too hot to touch very quickly.

How does a card like this work inside a case without failing?

Or, are they sold like that and expect the retailer to glue on a HSF and the store dumped these units for some reason?

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

They ran hot, but they were within operating specs... Sometime they were cooled with just heatsinks (much like what you would put on the RAM of your video card now).
Tas.

 

[imported_Kensai]

Some old cards never needed a heatsink to operate properly. Either that or you're supposed to stick a heatsink with thermal tape on it.

 

[JesseKnows]

Kensai, I see tape is a variation on glue, perhaps a more practical one.

tasburrfoot78362, it was too hot IMHO for use without any sink. And all other TNT2 or Geforce2 MX cards I have seen (not that many, I admit) did have at least a passive HS.

 

[IEC]

Originally posted by: JesseKnows
Kensai, I see tape is a variation on glue, perhaps a more practical one.

tasburrfoot78362, it was too hot IMHO for use without any sink. And all other TNT2 or Geforce2 MX cards I have seen (not that many, I admit) did have at least a passive HS.

I've seen at least 2 of each of the cards you mention that were completely passively cooled - no HS or fan. Granted these are the lower-end models, but still many old GPUs needed no cooling.

 

[Bona Fide]

I had a Geforce 2 MX, and it had a REALLY small fan on it. Like 20-30mm.

 

[Cruise51]

I have a TNT card with no HS or fan. Most cards back in the day simply didn't make enough heat to justify having one.

 

[milleron]

Heck, we don't have to go too far back to recall CPUs that had no heat sink or fan. If you can run a CPU without cooling, it shouldn't be too difficult to understand how graphic cards did it. After all these things were NOT the GPUs (Graphic Processing Units) we use today. Back in the day of the TNT, most of the computing was done in the CPU and the display adapter had to do little more than the digital-to-analog conversion for outputting a signal to the CRT, sort of analagous to what sound cards do today.

Ron