Dissecting The X1900XTX Stock Cooler....

[NightCrawler™]

Since I took off the stock cooler to replace it with the vf900 I decided to take apart the stock cooler and see what makes it tick inside...

The cooler... still in one piece..


The back of the cooler.. You'll see five little screws, these hold the base and top together..
Now it's easier to get laid on the Internet then to unscrew those screws.. I actually had to use near brute force to get them out...


Close up of one of them tiny @#$%


Separated.. It shows a large two piece soldered together copper block with......


Heatpipes....???


The base of the block which makes contact with the GPU.... You can see it's machine polished but it could be much worse... *cough*Big Typhoon*cough*


The noise maker.... (??)




I wanted to know if the cooler itself is that loud or if there are other factors which makes the Boeing 747 take off noise... so I hooked it up on a 9v battery..


Yes there was some noise.. but definitely not the noise you normally hear. far from it actually...
If I had to label it it would be quiet/slightly audible <30db...


Next was to place the fan back in the white casing and let her rip again...


Noise levels did increase a fraction but still nowhere near the 747 noise...

I had only one option left which was to cover the bottom of the fan top.. I used a plastic transparent plate to cover the top and instantly I was welcomed with the familiar 747 noise..
Sorry for the bad pic but I only had smoked acrylic....


The noise definitely is generated by the very narrow opening between the base plate and the plastic white cover.. It has to suck the air through the tiny opening which cause the noise...
One makes you wonder what effect it would have if you create a bigger opening.. you will lose a lot of the effect the fan creates probably.. but I'm not sure about that one yet...

To be continued.....?

[LiQU!D]

Wouldn't the fan normally run at 12v? Thus making it noisier then you can attest to with it taken apart.

[NightCrawler™]

The fan runs at various speeds/voltages... I didn't have a 12v line at hand so I used a battery instead...
Regardless of the fan running at slightly lower speeds then at 12v the difference is there by a very large margin..

[geforce man]

This interests me greatly, the stock air cooler is actually very good, its just noisy as hell. Id love to run it 24/7 @ 100% if i could get it quieter (x1800xt here) as i can currently clock to about 750/850 on stock air cooling . (im going to try modding an alpha pal 8045u to the card soon for extreme benching sessions tho )

[Hystrix^]

off topic, which camera do you have, you've really awesome pictures

[NightCrawler™]

It's a borrowed Kodak DX4330.. All images were taken with macro settings and then resized in Photoshop...

[Hystrix^]

very nice pics Im going to try that whit my konika minolta

[Vapor]

For 12V, get two 1.5V batteries to help out that 9V you've got

[Sparky]

For 12V, get two 1.5V batteries to help out that 9V you've got

Or, just get a 12V DC wall adapter

I have a PSU from an old external SCSI 1X CD-ROM that I use for stuff like that - yes, 1X It has a single HD molex plug on it which I've wired up random adapters to fit different fan connectors. Works pretty well