Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Windows 7 PC Build

Did you replace the stock coolers to accomplish this? I think I'd be interested in replacing the stock fans for noise, if nothing else, but I've never done it on a video card.

Aftermarket coolers for video cards most of the time seem to be generic, with multiple mounting holes where you're just supposed to find the right spacing that'll fit your card. I prefer something that's a little more tailored to a specific model.

Just something to watch out for when doing your shopping.

Thanks for the heads-up.

The batmobile coolers on the new 58x0 series (and some 5770s) are supposed to be quite good.

And they look way cooler than most aftermarket coolers I've seen--I hate to admit it, but that's part of the reason I want a 5870...

Good to know. I hadn't really paid any attention to comments on the stock coolers of current video cards.

Nope, just the standard cooler. They are actually quite good on this series. To get the 25% overclock (900 MHz), I had to bring the voltage up a bit to 1.15V. At this speed and voltage, I have the fan set to run at about 35% until the crad hits 60C, then it ramps up to about 55%. At 35% it is pretty quiet. At 55%, it is not so quiet, but the card is under load at this point so the sound of gaming drowns out the fan

At idle, the card is 52C with the overclock.

I just bought an eVGA nvidia 260 (core 216) to replace an ATI 4850.
The ATI has a brutally loud fan. The eVGA does much better even under load, though i am considering getting something other than the stock fan. I replaced the fan on a previous 9600 GT card with a large passive Zalman; no noise and the card worked perfectly fine, though no overclocking was ever attempted.
GPU temps stayed below 60C.

Figured I'd post this here just in case you run into a similar situation during your build.

Since I'm about to cram 4 more CPU cores into the same case I'm running now (going from 8 to 12 cores) I figured I'd better finally do something about my cooling. My machine starts out fine after it's been off for an hour, but after a while the fans start running fast and faster. Basically it seems to be heat soaking. In an effort from Supermicro to keep the case quite, they didn't put an exhaust fan on the rear, but instead lined the front of the case with 4 intake fans, and provided a air shroud to move the air over the passive CPU heat sinks. The problem is, I put a Tyan board in the Supermicro case. So the shroud the included didn't line up with anything. So I put fans on each of my CPUs, but they just get the heat up into the case, not out. There's an optional rear fan from Supermicro, but it's a 4-pin PWM fan--it's an odd size, and a standard fan won't fit. The problem comes up that I don't have any more PWM headers on my board.

I had theorized that providing the power to the fan, along with splitting the PWM lead would allow to fans to be run from one header--the RPM monitor should only be connected from one fan (else a 2x reading would be returned). I just now found a company which makes just what I needed the Ak-CB002. This allows one 4-pin PWM header to be still connected to the fan to be monitored (like the CPU fan), in addition two more fans get the same speed setting from the split PWM lead. And as to not tax the somewhat fragile board header the power for the fans comes directly from the power supply. Brilliant. I ordered 3 of them.

Nice find on that splitter.

I ordered more pieces for my computer. I ordered the power supply and motherboard. RAM and video card remain. For RAM, I was thinking of this, but if anyone knows of better memory/better prices, that would beat me doing more of my own research. Ha ha.