Video Card Cooling Mod

[Bad213Boy]

I was wondering if anyone has ever removed their video card cooler and tried cutting out an aluminum plate and then attaching a 120mm high CFM fan to it. I'm wondering if that would work better than the current GPU shrouds.

[Ivanlabrie]

Removing the cooler wouldn't be a good idea...It has some form of radiator inside the shroud, so you would lose on surface area.
There are things like Arctic Cooling or Thermalright Shaman coolers which rely on heatpipes+radiators+bigger fans like conventional cpu coolers and work quite good.

[CrazyNutz]

I was wondering if anyone has ever removed their video card cooler and tried cutting out an aluminum plate and then attaching a 120mm high CFM fan to it. I'm wondering if that would work better than the current GPU shrouds.

It may or may not.

If the heatsink itself is up to snuff it might help.
For example a I have gtx460 that uses a cheapy aluminum heatsink. I removed the 80mm stock fan and strapped a 120mm to the heatsink made no real difference in temps.
I tried shrouding it with cardboard (just to test) did not help.

Now on the other hand I tried somthing similar on a msi twin frozr and it worked well.

[Gimmpy224]

I wonder if perhaps you could remove the plastic cover on the card and then form a custom shroud for it, this would leave the radiator intact but you could potentially mount other fans onto the thing. I may look into this in the coming days.

The issue is going to be that it may weigh down the card wayyyyyy too much and make it lean....


^_^ time to dust off my CAD

[desnudopenguino]

I got a 5830 that had a busted fan, so I pulled off the plastic cover and zip-tied a 120mm(yate medium speed) fan to it. It doesn't weigh the card down too much, and it cools pretty well (82c at 100% in my room which is pretty warm as well).

[Ket]

I've done similar things to CPU stock coolers before. Removed the crummy 70mm-ish fan and slapped a 80mm high CFM fan. Generally works pretty well. For GPUs though your better off buying a 3rd party cooler.

[NEOAethyr]

In the past I would replace the heatsink with a cpu one, usually an old alu a64 heatsink, old fx ones I think...
Big ones...

Zip ties generally don't work to well, it could be unbalanced or not tight enough.
I once snapped off some smd mem caps off a 4600ti (quadro 900xgl hard modded), I had to clock it's mem from 700+mhz down to 200-250mhz to keep it stable in windows, not stable in dos or the bios lol.
All that over a snapped zip tie ^^.

Epoxy tim I don't recommend either.
Did that to my 8600gt and my gt240.

The 8600gt, overheated and died within 30mins(installed windows and it died after the next post) when I placed it in a normal case where the heatsink faces down.
It was running fanless, never had a single issue until then.

The 240gt, worked fine until I put it in a normal case yet again lol.
After a few weeks of being in that case, little use, my cousin was staying over for a week.
He was playing skyrim on it.
After a few hours of playing it, it started crashing.
Even the bios was crashing.
I thought maybe the pwm was going out on the dfi, it was the 790fx-m2r board.
I had fans on both the pwm and the card it's self, both 120mm fans.
I put that pc away, a month ago I went to put it together and sell it to that same cousin of mine, and noticed what happened...
The heatsink fell off the card, it was never at sub zero temps either.
The stress of being a large heatsink on an upside down card (normal), even though it was an epoxy, didn't work for very long.

Supposedly the thing to do these days is get yourself a bracket for your card to fit a water cooler on it.
Like the corsair's or nzxt's.

To put it simply, the things I've learned are:
No zip ties (It's ok to use to hold a fan in place though, but not a heatsink)
No tim epoxy (maybe it's ok for pwm's and mem..., sticky tape tim doesn't cut it for either of those - restricts heat transfer).

[Ket]

When in a bind, epoxy is also great for fixing DIY VRM botch-ups