Better Cooling for the 7800GTX - Page 5

Don't think so

Yeah i was going to say something. Might have to get out my Hoff. kidding.

make me????

Just read this thread and it seemed Mr K6 was nothing but helpful and didn't warrant the bad rep bomb. Looks like the offending party has been "taken care of" though.

"Oh Mr K6, you sexy beast you. Will you help me make my entire laptop run on 2volts and still be stable to play BF2 with full detail on my WXGA+ screen?!?!"

You know you're going to start setting yourself up for stuff like that eventually man! =)~

ok... so I have 2 7800 GTX's... one with AS5 and one without... I have applied AS5 in all manners to one 7800 and the temps just dont get down to the stock 7800... any advice? Ive applied AS to the gpu and heatspreader, just to the gpu, a thin layer.. a not so thin layer....

any suggestions?

It seems for some reason Dawn of war on 1 or 2 maps brings the GPU to like 91 on the AS5 and up to the mid 80's on the stock...SW:BF2 is mid 80's and CoD2 is also mid 80's... this is using the nvidia temps...

You need to apply a semi-thick layer, not to much though. The app should be about the size of one grain of rice or 1 1/2.

When I installed my 7800 yesterday, I thought long & hard about whether or not I was going to AS5 it. I decided to install it stock just to make sure the darn thing worked, and also because I screwed up my 6800 by AS5'ing it, and the wife would kill me if I did it again...

But I really think that the 7800 heatsink (and the 6800 one, too) is designed for the Dell thermal/metal pad. When you screw the heatsink to the backplate, there's by design a gap left in there, that the stock pad fills. You would need a fair amount of AS5 to fill that gap, and even then, you're asking the AS5 to do something it's not designed to do.

In the end, I think I'm going to keep the 7800 cooling stock. nV control panel shows it idling at 52C (in a 68F room), and it doesn't go over 73C running RTHDRIBL for 30 minutes (fullscreen), so I'm pretty happy with that.

I decided not to go the AS5 route for fear of messing it up. I wanted to test as to whether an external cooling solution would make any difference. I bought 2 PCI dual slot extractor fans with molex connectors and hooked them up to a 15v power supply from an old toshiba laptop. I placed the fans on each side of the 9300, right beside the vents. I ran AtiTool for an hour then RTHDRIBL for 30 mins and noticed the temps never went above 77c. Without the fans the temps would go much higher, usually in the mid 80's. Note also that i am oc 730c1200m using XPS A04 BIOS (no i9kfangui) and stock cooling pad. At idle the GPU would be in the low 40's and the CPU, 28c.
The only problem is the fan noise and the fans might be taking up some space, but what the hell, with cooling like this, i really cannot complain!

I had the same problem with my 6800, too thick of a layer of AS5 had to be used and really takes away a lot of it's cooling ability since it's not designed to be used that way.

Now that I have a 7800, I'm just going to leave it stock in regards to cooling, but I'll overclock it a bit to see what happens.

My real problem is that I live in warm places and it's not worth running the AC all the time just to keep the computer cooled off. Electricity is too expensive in the places I live to do that.

-Doc

Always at 70-80 F depending on the outdoor temp (norm. 75). Hate hurricanes, the temp goes up to 98 indoors
Still waiting to find time for a Home Depot visit, seeing if I can't get any copper sheet while I'm there. It's better then paying for some (probably) jacked up prices and shipping.

I found the JustCooler NB-101 PCMCIA cooling card still for sale $50. PCMCIA cooler will not work cause xp turns power off with no data . What if it's powered by the USB? One could use the power cord from an External USB Cooling fan and attach it to the fan in the PCMCIA cooler?

Good idea fetz I won't be bothering with any fan as I, along with others, perfer my Audigy 2 zs notebook card in place of some extra cooling. I get a much better gaming experience that way. But very nice idea none-the-less fetz.

I AS5 my other card again and say temps up to 89 C... which isnt all that bad... but the stock on hits 85... bit better... There is this one map in dawn of war that just kicks the cards ass... no idea why... so ill keep the stock one in for now and shelve the other 7800....

i noticed a extreme difference in overall laptop stability when i replaced the chipset thermal pad ,it's the same pad they use on the geforce memory . also now I no longer have any wireless problems . it's more stable . i cant see a sponge like pad with air holes doing any better then artic silver. if you look at reviews those thermal pads are the worst . Even if artic silver was not made for a gap that large it beets the heck out of that sponge like pad with a thermal resistance 100 times worse. With out moding the graphics card . “may be upgrading to 7800 soon .”i was able to lower temps .now top temp 6800ultra gpu 50c - 55c and top temp 2.26 cpu 60c .playing ut2004 for a few hours . I ducted with clear packing tape the air flow on the cpu and gpu fan to heat sink. The way dell has them recycling lots of air. Now my cpu ide is 32c . Before my idle was 50c- 69c with fans on full. It’s a trial and error. You can not completely duct the gpu fan or it will run hotter some air needs to flow by the case to cool it down. Now even when ambient air is hot it makes no difference. Before I had to sit in front of a open window wile it’s snowing outside just to play a game for a few minutes before it overheated . thought i share this experience i was having temps reaching 89c and idling 69c with fans on full and was not able to play games longer then ten minutes , I couldn’t download anything with wireless and was about to throw the laptop out the window . Also i cleaned all the crap out of the heatsinks out.now fans never speed up even when playing games and case stays cool . memory door warms up a little thats all