Rough guess - you guys think I could get away passively cooling a 6600GT?

[hoorah]

Hey guys,

Moving some computers around in the house and will be re-purposing our HTPC as an HTPC for our bedroom. The only spare video card I have for it is a 6600GT (PCIe), the passive video card it has now will be going into the new HTPC.

So, this 6600GT, when it was in use, had a nasty fan problem. It would whine horribly until it started to warm up, then it was quiet-ER, but still very noticeable. So, I pulled the fan off and mounted the biggest HSF I could find to it - a P4 (I think) HS with a 60mm fan that I pulled off of a junk computer - I want to say it was a celeron 1.5ghz? The HS is about 2" high, and by rough guess, weighs about 4x what the old HSF on the video card weighed (much smaller HS, but had a fan).

I'm hoping to run it without the fan if possible, and just wanted to get an idea from you guys if you thought it was feasible. Obviously, if the temps get too high I can plug the fan in and won't have a problem, and obviously, I'll be testing the setup to be sure. Just wanted to see if anyone might have tried this already and would be able to give me an idea if I'm wasting my time or not.

The video card won't be used for games or anything, and its too old for DXVA I believe, so usage will be minimal.

 

[AstroGuardian]

I have tried it with a Gigabyte Geforce 7600. But i had an exhaust cooler attached to the htpc case. The card was hot but i could live with that since it was an old card and i didn't care much.

 

[hoorah]

I have tried it with a Gigabyte Geforce 7600. But i had an exhaust cooler attached to the htpc case. The card was hot but i could live with that since it was an old card and i didn't care much.

What do you mean an exhaust cooler? Like a PCI slot fan? Or just lots of case fans?

The case I plan to use is holding a temporary server offsite for someone, so I don't remember how many case fans it has. I guess I'll just drop it in, check the temps, and see how hot it gets before I have to turn on the fan.

I was originally planning on connecting the P4 fan to the motherboard connector that matches, but now that I think about it, I suppose I could splice the wires and connect it to the GPU fan connector lead, which would allow the GPU to control the fan speed based on temperature. With the massive heatsink and large fan, I imagne it wouldn't turn on much.

Thanks for the reply.

 

[DaveSimmons]

I had a passive 6800, but it had a factory installed Zalman heatpipe cooler designed for passive GPU cooling, while your CPU HSF was probably designed to have the fan push air over it.

So: maybe, it might work. Try it and see.

 

[Throckmorton]

You could mount the heatsink so the fins are open to the side, and mount a big slow fan blowing into it

 

[hoorah]

I had a passive 6800, but it had a factory installed Zalman heatpipe cooler designed for passive GPU cooling, while your CPU HSF was probably designed to have the fan push air over it.

So: maybe, it might work. Try it and see.

Thanks. Yeah, its no heat-pipe cooler, but I might get lucky. I'll let you know how the testing goes. Worst case scenario is that I have to plug the fan in which will still sound better than the failing fan it had before.

 

[hoorah]

You could mount the heatsink so the fins are open to the side, and mount a big slow fan blowing into it

True, I didn't think of that. The heatsink is already glued (thermal adhesive) to the chip, so its stuck where it is. If I can mount a larger fan sideways, I might.

If not, I suppose I could also run the fan off of one of the 5V supply lines instead, I'm sure that would be plenty to keep it cool. I'll have to post a pic of this thing when I get home, it looks goofy big.

 

[PliotronX]

I'll third the quiet-fan-from-the-side rig. I just put together a circa 2004 setup for the heck of it with a 9700 Pro; quite the power hog in its own right but this one is voltmodded to 1.75v/3.1v. I drilled and tapped 4/40" holes into a Swiftech MCX370 clone and slapped that onto the 9700. Within minutes of firing up without a fan, the heatsink became too hot to touch registering over 65 degrees with a probe. I affixed a low speed Yate Loon with fishing wire and hot glue. Temps don't budge much from about 40 degrees now 😀 To heck with whiny fans.

 

[NoQuarter]

If you underclock it it should help bring the temps down to something manageable for fanless.

 

[Throckmorton]

I'll third the quiet-fan-from-the-side rig. I just put together a circa 2004 setup for the heck of it with a 9700 Pro; quite the power hog in its own right but this one is voltmodded to 1.75v/3.1v. I drilled and tapped 4/40" holes into a Swiftech MCX370 clone and slapped that onto the 9700. Within minutes of firing up without a fan, the heatsink became too hot to touch registering over 65 degrees with a probe. I affixed a low speed Yate Loon with fishing wire and hot glue. Temps don't budge much from about 40 degrees now 😀 To heck with whiny fans.

I once attached a fan to a heatsink with hot glue... now that was a bad idea.

I'm sure the fishing line is doing all the work, but if you want to use glue, get some epoxy

 

[Throckmorton]

I had a Geforce 4400Ti with one of the big heatsinks and 2 little fans. A blade broke off one of the fans, so I ripped both of them off and epoxied on a big 80mm fan... quiet and cool. The original "2 slot" card

 

[hoorah]

Well, it didn't turn out as well as I had hoped. With the fan off and the case open, the card idles at around 67C (just booting into windows). With the fan on, it runs at about 48C.

Using Windows Media Center with the case closed, but the fan on, the card sits around 55-60C. Without the fan, I think it would be too much.

Too bad too, because the cooler blocks my second PCIE slot. I knew it would block the PCI slots, which I didn't care about, but I completely forgot about blocking PCIE. Dagnabbit.

I may try clipping the wires and running the fan at 5V instead of 12, or possibly mounting a larger fan closeby the HS to draw air in if I feel ambitious.

 

[alfa147x]

Did you try underclocking it?

 

[hoorah]

Did you try underclocking it?

More than it already is? No.

I used GPU-Z to measure temperature and clock speed. When 'idle', the units underclocks itself to 300mhz (from 500mhz) automatically. When 'loaded' with windows media center or a game, it bumps the GPU speed up to 500mhz.

I'm not really sure how much of a load media center by itself is. The card doesn't have Nvidia's CUDA (too old), but WMC does use directX more than the aero desktop. Anyway, its enough load to bump up the chip from 300 to 500mhz.

I suppose I could try to force the thing to stay at 300mhz, but its been a long time since I've messed around with overclocking programs. The last time I did it, I used Ntune, does that still work?

Something I found strange was that the last time I used Ntune on this board, it always showed the CPU as underclocked (FSB @ 193mhz instead of 200mhz), even though CPU-Z showed it at the correct 200mhz. I never really trusted the reported numbers from ntune.

If I were to turn off the fan and run windows media center to get a real number on how hot this thing gets, how high would you guys let it run before killing the experiment? I've seen reports of these things operating as high as 90C without serious problems, but those threads are old and its possible that if anyone did have problems they'd probably just have replaced the card.

I know I could just jump on one of these newer Passive ATI HTPC cards for like $25 after rebate, but this frankenstein cooling modification game is fun.

 

[0roo0roo]

bit late but i did somehwat the same thing. i didn't go that far with the p4 cooler, i just disconnected the gpu fan and glued a 92mm fan to a bent metal slot cover bracket and have it blowing straight at the card heatsink. i also removed the metal plate covering the heatsink. works well enough, the card doesn't really do squat when in a htpc since it has no working acceleration. to slow the fan i used an old fanmate controller. super cheap, not sure what the modern equiv is, might be still the same thing lol. but yea you lose atleast two slots doing it this way, but it is quiet.

so really thermal adhesive is all you need to hold a heavy ass headsink off a gpu? i was thinknig of doing the same to my old 9600gso htpc..now that one is bugging me, it is loud as hell...but it does accelerate video decode and cuda support for coreavc as well. just how permanent is it, can you ever remote that thing?