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Passive VGA cooling

S

suszterpatt

Senior member
Got a Leadtek 6600GT running in here, and I may look for a less noisy cooling solution for it. Naturally, passive springs to mind, but is it possible to cool a vid card efficiently in passive mode? And even if so, will I be able to use that same cooler on a more advanced vid card once I get to upgrading? On the flip side, is there enough longevity in the Zalman VF-700?


I was looking at Thermaltake's CL-G0003 or the huge arse CL-G0009 (2100+ cm^2 heat dissipation area, of which 500+ is outside the case).
 
I have a passivly cooled Gigabyte 6800 plain jane and will be staying with AGP
for awhile. So i have subscribed to this thread with some real personal intrest.


Galvanized
 
Originally posted by: suszterpatt
Got a Leadtek 6600GT running in here, and I may look for a less noisy cooling solution for it. Naturally, passive springs to mind, but is it possible to cool a vid card efficiently in passive mode? And even if so, will I be able to use that same cooler on a more advanced vid card once I get to upgrading? On the flip side, is there enough longevity in the Zalman VF-700?


I was looking at Thermaltake's CL-G0003 or the huge arse CL-G0009 (2100+ cm^2 heat dissipation area, of which 500+ is outside the case).
Click to expand...

I highly doubt a 6600gt could handle being passive. I used to own one of them and it sat at 50c idle! Most high end cards could never be passive, they create way too much heat. Plus I doubt a video card could hold that heavy of a heatsink without some sort of aftermarket mouting bracket.

You just need a AC silencer or the zalman, they are both great quiet coolers
 
Mine idles at 40 °C (39 actually) on stock... and can't GPU's get to very high temps without getting damaged? Hell, in AT's 6600GT review I saw cards that ran at 90 °C out of the box! Is passive cooling that inefficient?


Now don't get me wrong, I'm all for the Zalman if there's really no other option. I'm just trying to see if I can get rid of that much more dB's in exchange for a couple extra degrees of heat.
 
Neo2 is an AGP mobo, right?

You can use the Aerocool VM-101 on ur 6600gt. The Zalman ZM80x-HP fits with some ugly modifications.

Anything that Gigabyte dares to sell passive can be passively cooled with proper installation of a ZM80D-HP.

The ZM80D-HP supposedly works well enough to cool 6600GT/6800LE/6800/7800GT passively. You will need *some* (weak is enough) airflow in your casing, and a separate mounting kit for 6800/7800 though.
 
Originally posted by: Techno Pride
Neo2 is an AGP mobo, right?

You can use the Aerocool VM-101 on ur 6600gt. The Zalman ZM80x-HP fits with some ugly modifications.

Anything that Gigabyte dares to sell passive can be passively cooled with proper installation of a ZM80D-HP.

The ZM80D-HP supposedly works well enough to cool 6600GT/6800LE/6800/7800GT passively. You will need *some* (weak is enough) airflow in your casing, and a separate mounting kit for 6800/7800 though.
Click to expand...
How ugly is "ugly"? 🙂


Btw, just stumbled upon a review of the CL-G0003. It seems to do pretty well as far as temps go, and considering the additional features of the CL-G0009 and that I have a side intake fan (albeit now very powerful), I think there's a fair chance that it will cool my current (and hopefully future?) card properly. Gonna have to compare it with Aerocool's products.
 
I started with the Zalman "passive" ZM80[x] coolers for an ABIT GeForce4 Ti4600 card.

I had a thermal sensor on the underside of the card between the solder-pins at the GPU core ("top" of the card oriented in a conventional ATX tower case). With the stock cooling solution, the card would hit 129F (and I wasn't using a game that gave the most intensive stress, either.) When I added the ZM80A, the thermal sensor read about 106F.

I've since put them on my sis-in-law's gamer (a ZM80C), my brother's AGP card (a ZM80A), and my FX5950 Ultra AGP (ZM80D with the OP-1 fan solution.) Generally, the AGP card barely hits 40C on a warm day at idle, and is usually idling between 32 and 38C as measured by the AGP's own internal sensor. Running several games, I've never seen it crack 115F or so.

The problem with these coolers is that they are not compatible with the nVidia 6800 and 7800 PCI-E cards. Zalman is currently pushing that "700" "mini-flower" that looks like a clone of the 7000 or 7700 CPU coolers. I don't know if they will update the ZM80 design for those cards, but it sure works well. It performs a couple C degrees better than the equivalent ARctic Cooling Silencer solutions -- which are also good.

 
Well... having spent a couple of hours searching for reviews on passive coolers (including the CL-G0009), I have come to the conclusion that I'd be better off by getting an active cooler that can handle a next gen (or next-next-gen) video card.


So, the next question is: what's the difference between the Zalman VF700 and the FS-V7 (Fatal1ty) coolers?
 
Originally posted by: suszterpatt
Well... having spent a couple of hours searching for reviews on passive coolers (including the CL-G0009), I have come to the conclusion that I'd be better off by getting an active cooler that can handle a next gen (or next-next-gen) video card.


So, the next question is: what's the difference between the Zalman VF700 and the FS-V7 (Fatal1ty) coolers?
Click to expand...

"Fatal1ty" is a different color, has the name "Fatal1ty" on it, and costs way more.
 
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