Loud Fan On My ATI Radeon 9600 256Mb

[DoPeFiSh]

I have an ATI Radeon 9600 256Mb DDR and the fan on it as the loudest fan in my system, can you buy a quieter fan for a video card?? A friend of mine suggested to make my system water cooled......Ahhhhh.......I don't think I wan't water in my PVR.....

Any help will be greatly appreciated......

Thanks

[fuzzweed]

my ATI has the same fan and heatsink mounting holes as the northbridge, so any northbridge cooler works with it, the only problem is that these are normally thicker than the original heatsink so can block a PCI slot.

water cooling wont make it silent - it still needs a fan for the radiator AND a pump to move the water about.....

[DoPeFiSh]

I looked on amazon for the northbridge cooler, is it a fan or just the heatsink, cause all I see seem to be just the heatsink.......thanks

[herbs]

No you can buy aftermarket coolers for the graphics card. Something like artic cooler or zalman vga cooler. I have the second one on my 9800pro, running at 7 volts.

[K.S.]

before you spend the bucks for another cooler... why not change it for a fanless version?

[DoPeFiSh]

you mean just a heatsink?? is the fanless just as good as the fan type? I don't know how hot the video card gets......

[fuzzweed]

I cant really claim how a 9600 will work, but the fan on my 9550 broke, and it was months before I realised - but it kept working fine. A proper passive heatsink would be far more efficient than the tiny bit of aluminium that was left on mine.
On a side note though I notice that the zalman passive cooler mentioned below still blocks off the 1st PCI slot - has anyone seen a thin aftermarket heatsink anywhere.....

[gEd]

http://www.quietpc.com/gb-en-gbp/products/vgacoolers

I have the predecesor to the ZM80 passive heatsink on my 9600pro and it works perfectly. It doesn't block off any PCI slots as there is a decent gap between the AGP and the 1st PCI slot. i.e. there is an removable backplate between the AGP and first PCI but this doesn;t correspond to a PCI slot.

This is why I prefered my 9600 over my 9800pro. the later is far more powerful but runs very hot and couldn'd be run with a passive cooler. Also, I couldn't see any obvious differences in picture quality on my SDTV.

hth

[K.S.]

you mean just a heatsink?? is the fanless just as good as the fan type? I don't know how hot the video card gets......

i'm not sure if these heatsinks are sold apart, but there are fanless versions out there, they've got bigger/flater heasinks built on from the start

[MaBo]

Maybe you can use the program speedfan (http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php) to control the speed of the fan. It will only speed up when it is needed...

Works fine for me, though only on the cpu fan.

MaBo