2007
10.25

My new heat sync

By: Mike
Category: Computing, Hardware / Tags: no tag / Add Comment

I was sick of not being able to run new games and I wanted to play S.T.A.L.K.E.R so I bought an nVIDIA GEForce 7300GT 512mb AGP8x gfx card. Previously I had an ATI Radeon 128mb thing.

I did normal procedure, the new card registered on boot, and then when in Windows after a couple of minute the gfx card just gave up and I had no signal to the flatscreen. Restarted computer and same thing happened so I took it out and discovered the thing was white hot and I’m guessing overheated which is why it died. It has a fan with a circular heat sync around it, and another heat sync on it too, but just a couple of mins of running and it didn’t love it.

Possible reason for this is that it’s in a minitower with not much space to breathe?

Well anyway I got an empty cocktail olives jar, the small thin kind, filled it with cold water, screwed the lid on tight made damn sure it wasn’t going to leak, and found that it nestles very snugly between my new gfx card and my usb pci card, touching both heat syncs but giving the fan room to work – and it’s been running perfectly for 5 hours running stalker and other games rather nicely.

However I don’t really want an olive jar full of water in my pc. I’m sure it won’t leak but it’s not cool. Anyone got any better ideas?

5 comments so far

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  1. Jonny said: 2007.10.26 07:31

    Lol!

    I did something similar a few year back by butchering an old PCI Card and super-gluing a 120mm fan on it to blow the hot air directly out the back of my PC to avoid my 9600Pro overheating (when I over clocked it!)

    If the card is crapping out on stock settings after 5 minutes then I would be concerned – sounds like you have a dud – request an RMA from where you bought it from buddy :)

  2. Chris Harcourt said: 2007.10.26 12:01

    Meh, my gfx cards are fanless…

    Have you tried running a really big magnet over it?

  3. Mike said: 2007.10.26 12:41

    no, funnily enough

  4. Anonymous said: 2007.10.28 23:35

    well, it’s still working, olive jar or no. weird.

  5. Oktal said: 2007.12.10 17:43

    Fanless graphics card for the win. Had my Gigabyte Geforce8600GTS 256MB SilentPipe3 for a few weeks now; I like it. Has crapped out once, after a long session on Stalker in a warm room. When I get my 3.2GHz Athlon64×2 I’ll reorganise the positioning of the super-quiet case fans with my new 120mm CPU fan, so it should be more stable.

    Also, Stalker fukin kicks asssss.

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