RADEON 9700 PRO HEATSINK MOD

Well back again for another modification involving unsuspecting computer components.

This time the victim is my Radeon 9700pro. Its a creative one and it is a nice card. However, like most video cards, the stock cooling leaves a lot to be desired. So, after a bit of deliberation and some spare time, i decided to victimise my radeon.

It has already been de shimmed, and the original cooler put back on.
Now radeons 9700pro's come stock at a core frequency of 325mhz. Mem is at 310mhz. With my deshimmed radeon i could get a core of 370 stable. Not bad with the stock cooler. However i wanted more, and since radeons have plenty of memory bandwidth, overclocking their cores always gets you a good result.

I did a 3dwang03 test at stock and got 4915. I will now add a nice tasty cooler to the card, see how high i can overclock it and then do the test again.

Right now comes the fun. First of the radeon with its default cooler. Here i have removed the fan to show a glaring defect with about 90 percent of video cards out there in the market today.

Notice how the fan sits right above the core of the heatsink? Not only does this mean that the heat has to travel to the edges of the heatsink before it can be dissipated, it also means the that hot core sits directly underneath the fan hub, which further reduces heat dissipation, and also heats the hub of the fan up, which dries the bearings out. All in all, a rather bad tradition that is getting worse because video cards are getting hotter and hotter. Anyways, rant over, that is my card.

The core. De shimmed. Notice how on the left hand side some of the heatsink compound has kinda fried and stuck to the surface of the core. The generic heatsink isnt flat and wasnt making good contact.

So the challenge here is to find a nice heatsink that i can safely attatch to the card without it shorting out any local components, and attatches without damaging the holes.

I had some heatsinks to chose from.

 

But due to its high performance and also having previous experience modding with this HS, i used THIS one.

Yes, the once again OEM AMD xp2000 skived HS. Light, good performance.

Now, the problem came to attatching this to the card. I wasnt going to epoxy it on, even if i DID have some epoxy lying around, i didnt want to do something that hardcore. So i had to use the current mounting holes that are on the card and use them somehow.

After some brain storming i came up with this solution. To use 2 long thin screws, and then drill matching holes in the heatsink. I position the HS on the card, and tilted it upside down, and use a pen to mark the holes. I then center tapped them to make sure my drill didnt go off and drilled the holes through the base. Now i didnt have a thread making tool, so my solution was a bit dodgy but works effectively. I placed both screws in the holes and then using a centre tap punch, i punched little divits into the aluminium around each screw. What this did was force the Aluminiun into the screw and create a thread of a kind that held the screw in.

Here, the hs after drilling and before my cheapo thread making.

After the thread making...notice the zoomed in bit. Thats the makeshift thread.

Right now it was a simple case of attatching the hs to the card!
Nice fit eh.. i had to move the topmost ramsink. It was only attatched with tape, so it was easy to move.

In this pic you can see that i have used to plastic washers and two lengths of plastic tubing to provide insulation and some tension. It stops the card from breaking in half, and/or crushing the core. And crushing a 650 dollar card is not my idea of fun.

To finish it off, i put the fan housing back on, and applied a bit of arctic silver to the core, and that was done.

Finished? NOT YET.

I still had some ideas up my sleeve. I know radeons get hot so after running it for a few hours and running my hands over the card, i found a few more hotspots to fix. Basically the power supply on the back of the card near the backing plate, the one with the aluminum plate on it, and a chip next to it, and also near the aux power connecter where a few chips that got really hot.

So out came the super glue and the mini heatsinks. Now some ppl might question the use of super glue here. I have several reasons. 1, its removable with acetone. 2, its non conductive. 3, it sets to a super hard plastic. As for the thermal characteristics, i justify its use because the chip itself is hard plastic, and what is a .01 mm layer of super glue going to do. The minor temperature drop across the glue is nothing compared to the drop internally, and also the total lower tempurature due to there being a heatsink and not just air cooling the chip.

So what did i do? Glued a heatsink to that plate, and made sure it bridged to the chip behind it.

And glue some mini Heatsinks to the chips at the back.

 

So what does the final product look like?

A bit heavier thats for sure.

So performance wise? i have no temperature measurements. So i had to go by the overclock.

New overlock? 388mhz!!!

3dwang score? 5512!!!

After running 3dwang03 for a couple of hours, i ran my hands over the card, and its definately running MUCH cooler. I have a 120 mm fan in the side of my case and it blows over this card, and on the whole it runs very nicely.

Todays experiment, SUCCESS!!

20/july/2003