Shuttle XPC and Sapphire 9700 Pro Heat Pipe

[angryowl]

Has anyone successfully paired the Shuttle XPC with a Sapphire 9700 Pro with the heat pipe?

My Geforce 3 is getting a little long in the tooth, and in preparation for this years DX9 games, I'm looking at new video cards.

I got a Shuttle XPC SN41G2 recently and have been absolutely loving it. I replaced the case fan with a quieter dual ball bearing model, and added a fan controller in the 3 1/2" bay, and put sound dampening material inside the case to reduce noise. I got it to where the PSU and hard drive were the loudest components, and it was actually pretty quiet.

(I was torn between building the world's quietest system, and getting a swanky SFF XPC, and the SN41G2 pushed me off the fence with its swankiness.)

When I determined that the XPC's on-board GeForce 4 SUX440 support wasn't gonna cut it for my gaming needs, I added in my old GeForce 3. Now my system is incredibly loud. Such disappointment.

I'm looking at heat-pipe cooled video cards, and it seems that I have the GeForce4/Zalman option (maybe GeForceFX too?), or the Sapphire 9700 Pro with heat pipe. I prefer the latter because I prefer ATI parts in video if possible.

My problem is that I don't know if I have the clearance around the AGP slot to install a heat-pipe-cooled video card.

Has anyone done this?

I'd love to hear any stories from XPC owners who have installed quiet video cards with big rendering muscle. It seems a shame that there's all that space over at the PCI slot (which I don't use for anything since every possible everything I could ever need is already on-board on the SN41G2) but the AGP doesn't have clearance.

Thanks!

Steve

 

[Lonyo]

I know it's not an answer to your thread, but you could get the heatpipe cooler and use it with a Geforce 4/FX or a different ATi card if you're willing to install it yourself.

Also, you might want to check the Small form factor part of the forum, there might be someone who's already asked the question there.

If you are willing to install the heatpipe cooler yourself then you have almost any card open to you (except the GF FX 5800).
The 9600 non-pro also (I think) comes with a heatsink only, but will be quite a bit slower than the 9700Pro, but you can be sure it will fit in your case.

 

[jm9843]

You may want to check out this thread:
Quieting the SN41G2

There is mention made of fitting the Zalman VGA heatpipe Cooler.

 

[angryowl]

First off, thanks for your response, and for the links to other threads. Seems that a few others have been trying to quiet their SN41G2's as well.

It's hard to get consistent info, and good size spec info on both the Sapphire Atlantis 9700 Pro, and the Zalman VGA Heat-pipe cooler.

I care only about the clearance on the "top" or chip side of the AGP card, whereas, in the case of the Zalman, there's more concern about clearance on the "bottom" side of the cooler and where it might interact with DIMMs, power connectors, fans, and parts to the RIGHT of the AGP card (if facing the slot opening up.)

Since the Shuttle has the AGP slot on the LEFT of the PCI slot, and towards the left of the case (facing the slot openings up) then this clearance is more or less meaningless.

Dead reckoning, given that Zalman claims that their VGA heat pipe requires at least 15mm on the "bottom" side of the card, it would seem they need about 25mm on the "top" side.

Sapphire was nice enough to give a pdf file picture of a blown up Atlantis card and clearances listed in mm. They claim 30mm on the "top" side, and 22mm on the bottom side of the PCB of the video card.

I guess the question for me is whether I have 30mm of room from the "top" side of the card's PCB to the edge of the XPC's case. It appears (from my dead reckoning) that maybe the Zalman heat pipe has more headroom. Can anyone comment?

Steve