How good is the stock heatsink/fan on a ti4600?

[Kraid2xd]

okay, I'm planning on getting a geforce 4 ti4200... and as usual, I plan to o/c it.

In order to get as muich bang outta it as possible, I plan on modding it with ramsinks and such, but there is one thing I am not sure of... that heatsink/fan on the gpu... anyone test its cooling effectiveness versus, say, a crystal orb? I have one sitting on my gainward gf3 ti200, and I could pull it off and put it on the geforce4....

What I'm asking overall, is: Is it worth replacing the existing geforce4 heatsink/fan with a crystal orb, or should I just stick with the stock cooling?

IMO, that HS/F doesn't look very effective since there are no vents on the top to increase airflow...

 

[Bingo13]

The stock setup on the VisionTek cards are working fine for me. I have my Ti4600s overclocked to 330/355(710) without an issue so far.

 

[Kraid2xd]

Hmmm.. interesting... but over at tomshardware.com, the three samples of ti4600's he got o/c'ed kinda poorly... with stock cooling that is...(except the leadtek one) He even mentioned that the Creative card had a somewhat crappy heatsink due to poor airflow and noise, and coincindentally, it follows the closest to nvidia stock cooling...

Anyone out there actually modded their card with an orb or something similar and o/c'ed it?

 

[Cuular]

I haven't modded mine yet. I am at the 330/355 as well, and it is still running strong, no extra little flashing pixels etc. I OC it by 10 core 20 memory at a time and then play the games I play for 3 or 4 hours to give it a good break in. If I can get another 10/20 out of it with the stock HSF I would call that very good cooling. I also have extra fans and holes cut in my case to encourage good airflow. That probably helps a lot.

EDIT:
After a few hours last night final OC was 330 core 370 memory (740). This stood up to about 5 hours of CounterStrike, EQ, Dark Age of Camelot, and DiabloII-Ex. This is all using stock cooling, with no ram sinks at all.

Like bingo13 below me I am going to find some ramsinks and see if I can't coax that memory higher. In games like EQ and daoc that are limited by the memory bandwidth, there is a huge difference with the memory OC. Leaving that at 370 and putting the core back to 300, seemed to "feel" the same.

 

[Bingo13]

<< Hmmm.. interesting... but over at tomshardware.com, the three samples of ti4600's he got o/c'ed kinda poorly... >>




He received sample boards, not retail production level boards. The stock cooling is working fine and any limitations in overclocking will be dependent upon your luck of the draw with the core/memory on the board. This assumes normal air cooling as the board really does not seem to get that warm and runs cooler than my GF3 Ti500s. I am happy with my overclocks and will try memory heatsinks on one card to see if the memory will go higher (highest so far before flaking out was 370(740)). Once again overclocking the core does not result in any real noticable improvements as the card is still memory dependent. It is probably a mute subject but the card is fast enough in games without overclocking anyway.

 

[Mavrick007]

Bingo13, which TI4600 do you have? That is a pretty decent overclock
Show some benches, I want to see what you're getting.