Koolance L06 waterblock on FX 5800 non-Ultra

[ricercar]

Last night during intense UT2004 I got fed up with the fan blower noise from my ASUS GeForce FX 5800 (http://usa.asus.com/products/vga/v9900/overview.htm) non-Ultra. Even though it's not a FX Flow, the fan has a high pitched whine.

I put put a Koolance GPU-180-L06 (Vid/MB) block (http://www.koolance.com/products/product.html?code=GPU-180-L06&category_id=3) on it. I figured that since I had more than one NV30 it wouldn't hurt much to experiment... w00t. As I hoped, the card runs totally silently (like duh!). The the nvControl Panel reports 2D/3D temperatures as 35°/44°C°, down from 48°/86°C. Time for some OC.

This was a 5800 non-Ultra with the black RAMsinks, which I did not remove. The RAMsinks get warmer than I like, even if they're not too hot to touch. I'm thinking it needs a low-RPM 120 mm fan to cool the RAMs, mounted on one of those Zalman fan arms (http://www.zalman.co.kr/usa/product/view.asp?idx=15&code=016).

Next I'm thinking to to experiment with taking the copper off of a 5800 Ultra. HighSpeed PC's Cool Matic FX RAM waterblocks (http://www.highspeedpc.com/Merchant2/merchant.mv?Screen=CTGY&Store_Code=HSPC&Category_Code=CoolMaticRAM) fit the 5900 reference board. I'll have to take measurements to see if they fit a 5800 Ultra before I lay out the cash . . .

[gkiing]

Putting waterblocks on the ram will NOT increase their overclockability by more than a few mhz (3 or so). This has been done in the past with even phase change on the ram, and it didn't yeild any better results.

[a5h]

Id stick with those ramsinks u have now ...or put on bigger sinks with a beefy fan over it ...and vmem mod the card ...that WILL increase the performance of the card drastically.

[ricercar]

Whew! I checked the NV30 thermal app note, and the waterblock is rated at about 5x what it needs to dissipate NV30 heat output. Looks like this is a keeper.

I agree with jkiing; I've never gotten more than 4 MHz additional overclock with RAMsinks on graphics card DDR. Aluminum heatsinks help measurably on MOSFETs, and are critical on CPUs/GPUs, but for DDR I buy pretty RAMsinks just for show.

However, my FX 5700U/5800/5800U use DDRII RAMs, not DDR. DDRII are such heatmongers that I think a waterblock may help. Until then it's a low-RPM fan on the Zalman arm.