I could't really overclock my x1900xt with a vf900-cu. It just got too hot, uber-airflow or not. So I'm the next one to be putting a CPU heatsink on a VGA.
I decided to use Thermaltake's Sonic Tower..
..because I only have about 7.5cm of space between the VGA and PCI-card. Heatpipes are easy to bend (really) so this cooler was just perfect. My plan was to bend the 'towers' so they both would be facing away from the mainboard. It worked out pretty well.
The heatsink can take tons of load, but the problem is getting good airflow to remove the heat. First I only put some 80mm casefans on it, thinking that would be enough with such an uberheatsink. At low volts that worked 'okay' but with higher volts the GPU temp just didn't stop rising, it was going up a straight line. So it was obvious that the heatsink was slowly heating up, 'half-passively'.
Though this bad-airflow setup still got me these results:
675/800 1.4vGPU Load ATITool artifact scanner
vf900-cu - Sonic Tower
73°C - 43°C
Not bad at all! It would instantly 'skyrocket' to only 39-40°C and then take a few minutes to finally settle at 43°C.
For real overclocking I needed some serious volts and some serious airflow. So I did, just see the pics below.
My results:
750/846 with 1.575/2.056/2.151/1.580: 58°C load ATITool artifact scanner(actually initially settles at 55°C but slowly warms up - an indication that airflow could be better).
Keep in mind that these results aren't the best I can get. For instance the base isn't lapped and I could've mounted it better (by accident I shifted the base a few times after applying some Ceramique and trying to mount - kind of a struggle). So maybe I can improve the temps by lapping it and remounting it securely.
Enough chitchat, on to the pics!
(btw the 120mm fan is an enermax 12FAB 80cfm and the 80x38mm fan is a delta that pushes around 80cfm also, but at 50ish dB )
The damn thing looks like some kind of canon lol :x
Cheers
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