ATI 3870 Water Cooling mod?

[ghostship]

Are any of the available Water Cooling mods, such as the Koolance water blocks, thin enough to allow me to cut down the dual-slot 3870 to a single-slot size? I'd really love to keep the 3870's while also freeing up my empty PCI slots, without having to downgrade to the 3850's.

[saaya]

welcome to XtremeSystems ghostship :toast:

there are thin waterblocks, so yes its possible, dont know which waterblock you mean though. i think 1950pro waterblocks will fit 100%, the memory location and the gpu location and mounting holes are identical afaik. but the gpu hight might be different... still, that should be easy to mod.

[Rol-Co]

if somebody have them still

nvidia 7800gtx and 7900gt innovatek waterblock will fit the ati radeon 3870 perfectly... :)

[ColonelCain]

Are any of the available Water Cooling mods, such as the Koolance water blocks, thin enough to allow me to cut down the dual-slot 3870 to a single-slot size? I'd really love to keep the 3870's while also freeing up my empty PCI slots, without having to downgrade to the 3850's.

:welcome: to XS!

Since the 3870 has seperated RAM-sinks and Mosfet coolers, why don't you just take off the GPU core heatsink, and the plastic piece, and use something like an MCW-60? That would bring it down to single slot. :yepp:

[jimmyz]

:welcome: to XS!

Since the 3870 has seperated RAM-sinks and Mosfet coolers, why don't you just take off the GPU core heatsink, and the plastic piece, and use something like an MCW-60? That would bring it down to single slot. :yepp:

that would still be dual slot. the MCW-60 is too tall for single slot, space between individual slots is 1/2" and the barbs alone are that big.

[saaya]

if somebody have them still

nvidia 7800gtx and 7900gt innovatek waterblock will fit the ati radeon 3870 perfectly... :)
does it even cover the memory and everything?

[heanwi]

The aquagratiX from Aquacomputer (http://www.aquacomputer.de/) (unable to link directly to the product) looks thin enough.

http://www.aqua-computer.de/images/products/gpu/aquagratix_rv670_4_800.jpg

http://www.aqua-computer.de/images/products/gpu/aquagratix_rv670_1_800.jpg

[Rol-Co]

does it even cover the memory and everything?

it covers the most of the memory, not all places 100% but the memory won't be suffer from that.

Here some results
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showpost.php?p=2664898&postcount=263

Modded and two 7800gtx waterblock's

[Cheffy]

the orginal koolance gpu180 fits it fine - but the oooold (asin radeon 9800pro days) clips wont stretch to the X1x00 / HD38x0 mount spacing. knock up another one from a drive rail, this is what i did - ~40C load at 860/1300 in a good old koolance 2pc601

[AliG]

why get a full cover block though? The 3870 has ramsinks pre installed, just get something like a fuzion gpu block or a swiftech mcw60

[Boogerlad]

he wants a single slot wb

[Garrett]

You'd still have to get a single vga bracket (where the DVI ports and the tv-out are located)
I have a single vga bracket on my 8800 Ultra now :D
Came with my very very old AC Silencer NV5 :) :up:

[Malik]

I have question: Did someone try put Innovatek 78xx series block on HD3850 ?

[tgR]

Has anyone found a single PCI slot cover for the 3870? I googled a bit with no luck.

[MagnumMan]

Single slot PCI bracket for Radeon (I have 4 in my rig): http://www.koolance.com/water-cooling/product_info.php?products_id=335

Water cooling block for Radeon 3870 (I have 4 in my rig):
http://www.koolance.com/water-cooling/product_info.php?products_id=579

Just learned about the pencil voltage mods last night. Hit a wall at 860MHz GPU speed so I'm going to hit the BIOS with an update and see how high it goes, then look into this pencil mod. My cards measure 50C temperature under load currently (in the Catalyst control panel). What tool can I use to graph CPU temp/load and GPU temp/load over time? Thanks.

http://www.amiaworld.net/qq_light.jpg
http://www.amiaworld.net/qq_dark.jpg

Last night I got 14070 3dMark06 score in Crossfire mode with 2817MHz CPU, DDR2-980 Mem, and 860/1261 Video gpu/mem clocks. Vista 64 SP1 RC Cat 8.1

[brydon10]

I use HWMonitor. It's a small app that monitors temps and voltages, it logs the highest temp reached from when you first start the app. Oh I see you wanted a complete log of temps, not sure on that one. http://www.cpuid.com/hwmonitor.php

[ownage]

Thats crazy MagnumMan, and also welcome to XS :up:

Do you have CrossfireX enabled?
If i look at youre 14k score it can't be enabled, 4way Xfire drivers aren't released yet.

[MagnumMan]

No, looks like just 2 of the 4 cards are used. Was hoping to get AMD's attention and get a prerelease 4-way driver just for my own edification but so far they are not going for it. :>

[Maxx103]

MagnumMan - <Darth Vader voice> Impressive, most impressive.

It looks like you used mostly Koolance parts - is that all you used in your set up? Can you give a list of what parts you used?

[Creek Tha Gray]

would like to know what your score is now with the 8.3 drivers and also Thanks for the link to the single slot pci bracket for radeon needed them.

Single slot PCI bracket for Radeon (I have 4 in my rig): http://www.koolance.com/water-cooling/product_info.php?products_id=335

Water cooling block for Radeon 3870 (I have 4 in my rig):
http://www.koolance.com/water-cooling/product_info.php?products_id=579

Just learned about the pencil voltage mods last night. Hit a wall at 860MHz GPU speed so I'm going to hit the BIOS with an update and see how high it goes, then look into this pencil mod. My cards measure 50C temperature under load currently (in the Catalyst control panel). What tool can I use to graph CPU temp/load and GPU temp/load over time? Thanks.

http://www.amiaworld.net/qq_light.jpg
http://www.amiaworld.net/qq_dark.jpg

Last night I got 14070 3dMark06 score in Crossfire mode with 2817MHz CPU, DDR2-980 Mem, and 860/1261 Video gpu/mem clocks. Vista 64 SP1 RC Cat 8.1

[MagnumMan]

I think it should be made known Catalyst 8.7 and later have removed Quad CrossFireX support, and AMD's technical support told me in a support ticket it is not supported.

Needless to say I am quite upset at this.
It's outrageous they could introduce something so revolutionary then kill it only a few months later. Some people on the game.amd.com forum tell me that it's my own fault because I am using modified BIOS and modified cards, and I should not expect the ATI reference drivers to even work at all. I think that's completely ridiculous. Catalyst 8.6 Hotfix 1 works, why would 8.7 and 8.8 only do 2-way CrossFireX in my rig? Someone mentioned that the BIOS may not have the right encryption key - does that make any sense?

I am using BIOS 010.071.000.000 on all four of my cards to get around the 860MHz limit.

See the rig at www.hydrabolt.com

[Boogerlad]

they are all wrong. it should work even with modded cards and bios. amd just removed it from drivers.

[MagnumMan]

The 010.071.000 BIOS that was originally posted to avoid the 862MHz limit has a problem on my system that it initializes one of the cards in 2x speed instead of 8x speed. So I flashed up to 010.081.001 which I found on TechPowerUp and that fixes the PCIe speed initialization issue, however even with RBE 1.14 I am not able to get the overdrive to work, it always snaps back to the flashed stock speed. So I'm just going to set the stock speed to 1000/1275 and be done with it.

Oh and Catalyst 8.7 and 8.8 do NOT support quad 3870 CrossFireX (across 4 cards). AMD's CrossFireX "compatibility" page only shows support for 2 *cards* (that can be X2, i.e. two X2 cards for Quad Crossfire). For some reason AMD removed support for Quad CrossfireX on 4 separate cards in Catalyst 8.7. It exists in Catalyst 8.3 through 8.6. I think it's a travesty that they removed this support after introducing it, and basically suckering enthusiast people such as myself to build based on a board (K9A2 Platinum with 4x PCIe 8x slots) when the only card available at the time was the 3870 (no X2, came out a month after I bought everything).

AMD technical support has so far been absolutely no help. They tell me they don't even support CrossFireX at all. So right now I am stuck on Catalyst 8.6 Hotfix 1 drivers (which really aren't that bad) and those are the only ones that allow me to use my rig as intended, with 4x Radeon 3870 working in parallel. I sincerely hope AMD fixes this issue and restores support for my rig. Considering the amount of time and money I spent on making a pure spider platform, I'm one very unhappy AMD customer right now.