Graphics Card Fan
Posted: September 24, 2006

Description

Introduction

Not that it is really an issue, the card runs just fine, but id like to put a little bit better cooling on it to just oc it a little, any little bit would help when running media center.

Anyway, I’m just messing around with different cooling options for the little graphics card I have. Water Cooling would be nice, just not an option in this case also, I don’t intend to buy more stuff, just looking to build from what I already have. I have bunches of raw materials.

The graphics card is a MSI Nvidia GeForce4 440mx 64mb AGP8x card, its the low profile version, so it can fit in my small case.

Project

Notice the crappy little fan MSI put on there, I guess it works in end, but I kinda wish the GPU had a heatsink of some kind, instead of just a fan blowing on a chip. So I decided to try just a heatsink with no fan on it, passive cool, how different from having a little dinky fan with no heatsink at all could it really be?

I cut that heatsink down to size, Took off an old Radeon 9600se That I put a Nvidia fx5900 cooler on. It had enough metal on it to cut the holes on the sides to mount it with some spring clips. However after about 2 hours of running this in the case, It was getting pretty hot, Not hot enough to fry, but this was not turning out to be the ideal situation.

So Now I am going to explore using the cooler off an old radeon 7200 PCI card. It was attached to the GPU with thermal adhesive, so No mounting holes on either side.

I just like this cooler because its thin, has a small heatsink, and the fan actually pushes more air at 5v than the stock cooler at 12v, also no noise difference, at least that I can detect.

Old fan, and then passive block I tried to use.

Here are the two mounting holes on the graphics card, if it helps to see them. Just a side note, I have very limited space thickness wise, My tuner sits in the PCI slot right next to the AGP slot, so just mounting a fan on the top of the passive block I wanted to use wont work. Also an image of where the card is physically mounted in my Media PC, this is why it is so imperative that adequate cooling be provided to the card.

I finally got the super glue i needed to finish my fan mod on my card. I ended up gluing the jack for the fan on top of the bios… not like that should be getting hot or going anywhere, I do not foresee any issues with that, plus the glue should bond nicely with the top of that bios. I also decided to keep the original fan connector on the card just in case for in the future, as stated previously the new fan is 5v, so I just looked up the AGP pinout table and located the correct traces on the cards PCB and soldered to them to get my 5v.

I know the images are in terrible quality, but I hope that it is possible to make out what I have done.