Zalman FB123 : Anyone ever use this to blow air down on their video cards?

[DaveyTN]

I've got two SLI cards running hot in my machine and was looking at this to see if it would work to help blow down air onto the video cards. Anyone use this?

 

[rise]

this? not yet but i'm getting one. looks to me like it will work well. i just wonder if it flexes at all, it would be nice to be able to bend/shape it. i'm thinking mounting iton the drive cage rail.

 

[DaveyTN]

Yep. Thats the one. It looks pretty neat. The metal on it looks pretty thick so it may take some effort to bend it - not sure. I'm going to order one and will post how well it works.

 

[rise]

yeah, i'll post back too, just trying to finalize the last of my parts for this damn htpc. now i need a silver internal card reader, pita.

 

[alexkraemer]

I've never used em for video cards, but they worked well for a quiet (and cheap) CPU cooling solution. I removed the fan from a stock Athlon XP heatsink and replaced it with a quiet 80mm panaflo. Even with the crappy heatsink, temps stayed in the 40s and my system was nice and quiet.

 

[karmasalad]

I used the FB123 for a couple of years to cool a Radeon 8500 whose fan I had unplugged. Worked fine for me, and I know of others who have done something similar as well.

Main thing you have to watch out for is the size of the other PCI cards that you might have in your PC. I had to get rid of the FB123 when I installed my Chaintech AV710 sound card because its presence prevented me from mounting the bracket properly.

 

[DaveyTN]

Is it the heigth of the expansion cards that interfere with the fb123 arm? I have two video cards that are in sli mode and I was wondering if the little bridge that is over the sli cards if it will get in the way of the fb123 arm??

 

[DaveyTN]

Ok, just as an update. I got the FB123 bracket and installed in my computer last night and it works great.

My goal was to blow the attached fan down onto my sli 6800gt video cards; I got it to work but it took a little modding.

The problem I ran into was that the video cards and especially the sli bridge were too tall and the area where the bracket attaches didn't have enough clearance to make it over the video cards.

I ended up taking a bunch of washers and using longer 6/32" bolts to get around this. I put the washers under the fb123 bracket and just above the expansion slots and ran a longer 6/32" bolt down through the bracket and through the washers and into the expansion slot screw hole.

This allowed me to raise the bracket up higher and clear the sli cards and the sli bridge.

The graphics cards are running much cooler now!!