Passive heatsink for GeForce Ti 4200?

[Bonesdad]

The fan is by far the loudest thing on this system. Can anyone recommend a passive solution for this card? WoW and HL are the only heavy duty games on it.

Short of a passive solution, is there a sink with a fan that is really low noise?

 

[Lord Evermore]

Thermaltake made the only GF4 3rd-party heatsink I ever found. I don't know if it was just because the heatsinks they came with were good enough that most people weren't interested in replacing them or if it was just too hard to make good ones or what. The TT model wasn't terribly loud but wasn't silent. The GF4 puts out a lot of heat, so you need either a very large passive heatsink or one with a powerful fan.

I assume this is an aging unit, so the fan may be starting to wear out. A little oil on the bearing might quiet it down a tad while you look for a replacement. One of the TT units will almost certainly be quieter than a dying stock fan.

When I was looking for a replacement on my Ti4400, since the TT unit was the only one I could find and it was just so small and not very quiet, I decided to improvise. I used an older SocketA heatsink with some zip ties to hold it down. Worked well for a couple of years, and with such a large heatsink the fan didn't need to be terribly powerful. Have to be somewhat careful not to bend the card when strapping the thing down, but weight shouldn't be too much of a problem, given how big some of those Zalman passive heatsinks are.

 

[Lazy8s]

I was actually JUST about to post a topic like this. I just had the bearings on the fan for my evga ti4200 die out on me. It sounded like a train in my living room. I am in the process of looking for a heatsink. Any help would be greatly appreciated. So far it looks like I have found:

http://www.coolerguys.com/840556041887.html
http://www.coolerguys.com/840556016533.html
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16835124006

Maybe this?....
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16835192007

 

[Lord Evermore]

According to the last letter to Dan here, a PentiumII heatsink works quite well fanless. Of course a PII heatsink is a pretty large and long block of aluminum. But based on that, a fanless SocketA heatsink would probably work pretty well, if it was a reasonable size.

Zalman coolers are of course pretty respected. It's assuredly going to be quieter than that "orb" style blue thing. I like the description of how the high speed fan cools the chip off "faster". Of course the high speed fan also means LOUD, and that's not a lot of surface area on the heatsink. And what the hell's an IceberQ?

If you've got an old big heatsink laying around, that's the easiest, quietest option, and it's cheap-as-in-free. 30 bucks for a Zalman just feels expensive when you're trying to make an old video card last a long time, when you can possibly get a new card with similar performance for almost the same price. Just buying a cheap big heatsink would be cheaper.

That slot cooler thing is pretty much pointless unless you desperately wanted to have a manually controlled cooling fan, and you'd be better off mounting the fan on the heatsink instead of on a possibly flexy wire frame, so they could have made it even cheaper (though less compatible). It'll also still be a pretty loud cooler, to try and push enough air through a stock heatsink from an inch or so away, with a lot of airflow just getting wasted.

As for heatpipe coolers, heatpipes are WAY overused these days. They get stuck into absolutely everything, whether they're needed or not. All they really seem to do is provide a smaller amount of actual surface for heat to be conducted away to the real heatsink, in some cases. (Weld a heatpipe to a copper plate along a 1 inch scretch, and there's less surface area of the heatpipe touching the copper plate and drawing heat up to another sink than if you just had a heatsink stuck onto it.) And the entire point of using those gigantic heatpipe coolers is to NOT have to mount fans on them, certainly not THREE small, loud fans. That Kingwin unit is cheap of course, so you don't lose out much by just tossing the fans, and would probably be just as good passively cooling the chip as a plain old CPU heatsink.

 

[ElFenix]

you could just remove the fan and strap a quiet 60, 70, or 80mm fan on there.

or you could go completely silent and just glue a socket 370 heat sink on there.

 

[Lazy8s]

Yep, I was just posting what I had found so far. I haven't found any nice cheap heat sink. Looks to me like rubberbands + and old piece of copper lying around is basically going to be the same as the options for sale. I'll keep looking and post anything I find. Don't forget ebay.