Is it safe to cool my Radeon 8500 with only passive cooling? (Meaning just a heatsink, no fan)

[SickBeast]

The fan recently stopped working, and I took it off and everything seems to work fine. The heatsink is a large copper low-profile cooler designed to cool a P3. Am I at risk of frying my card? Any info would be great.

 

[Auric]

If it works it works. If it gets too hot it will lock up.

 

[nick1985]

take a picture of it. i wanna see it

 

[Killrose]

I would down clock the core just to be safe. Probably 225MHz or so.

 

[xSauronx]

cant you just buy a little fan for the damn thing for a couple bucks? its worth it to make sure the card works, considering a new one could pay for several little fans...

 

[SickBeast]

ok...i've been up and running now for a few hours with ONLY a heatsink!! i underclocked the card to 348mhz (the minimum in rage3d tweak). no artifacts so far, but i am not running games, and the back of the core is very hot to the touch. i'm about to try powerstrip to downclock even further. it would be neat if i could passively cool my entire rig...i would just have to underclock my cpu as well.

i have pics of my 8500 mod if anyone is interested...just let me know your email and i'll send them off to you. with the fan, i managed to get around 315mhz on the core, which is a pretty good overclock from what i hear. i'm planning to put some sinks on the ram as well.

anyhow, thanks everyone for the input.

 

[Jeff7]

Maybe something like this would work.
I did also see a website where someone attached an Alpha 6035 to their videocard.

 

[Killrose]

Originally posted by: SickBeast
ok...i've been up and running now for a few hours with ONLY a heatsink!! i underclocked the card to 348mhz (the minimum in rage3d tweak). no artifacts so far, but i am not running games, and the back of the core is very hot to the touch. i'm about to try powerstrip to downclock even further. it would be neat if i could passively cool my entire rig...i would just have to underclock my cpu as well.

i have pics of my 8500 mod if anyone is interested...just let me know your email and i'll send them off to you. with the fan, i managed to get around 315mhz on the core, which is a pretty good overclock from what i hear. i'm planning to put some sinks on the ram as well.

anyhow, thanks everyone for the input.

You said you underclocked the core to 348MHz??!!, LOL, that's higher than most 9700's clock to. I think you mean 248MHz right??

 

[SickBeast]

oops...yeah, 248...and it's actually 245 to be exact

 

[kmmatney]

You can put a slot fan next to the card, to get some air flow around the heatsink. Slot fans are usually nice and quite and move a lot of air.

 

[Auric]

Gee, don't make it seem so complicated or mysterious. I've been running mine with a "586" style aluminium heatsink for half a year. It is cooler than the original tidgy heatsink and fan. The problem with copper is that unless the fins are very thin and there is airflow it will not dissapate heat very well. If there is already a front case fan then that is more than enough but I would suggest removing the PCI 1 slot cover. I have a front fan that is switched on for gaming because the 8500 is auto o'erclocked for games using Rage3D Tweak.

 

[kurt454]

Got a backup celeron machine running a sapphire radeon 9000 non pro. It comes with a passive heatsink. Core is at stock 250mhz. The card runs just fine. Use this machine for DVD's, so I don't like a lot of noise.