4870 vrm cooling

[roofsniper]

I would have thought the stock plate is made out of aluminium. You can buy sheets of copper off ebay, cut a piece to size maybe a 1 or 2mm think peice and bung it in there. I could send the stock plate to my mate who could measure it up using this funky 3-D mapping tool, it's like a pen on the end of a robotic arm thingy (getting technical now) where you set a datum point and touch the pen around the object you want to map 3 dimensionally and it gives you all the correct dimesions for the item, then you load that into a CNC or milling machine and knock up a perfect copy! Anyone wanna donate a thick enough copper plate to make a copy out of? :p

well i looked at the non red part of the stock plate and its a pretty dark grey and it feels really firm. i thought it would be aluminum as well but it doesn't seem like it. i haven't taken it off the cooler yet tho to see how much it weighs. but making a copper version of the stock plate would be amazing. especially if it would think that the thermal pads are part of the card. they would probably be too thick tho because they at least compress with pressure. but i would go for it if i was you. you could even simplify it and take off parts of it to reduce costs if you needed to. then while you are at it you might as well add some fins and heatpipes that lead out to fans. EXTREME VRAM/VRM COOLER.

[Reckless187]

The plate did feel a bit heavy to be Aluminium anow that you mention it, and as you say, it wasn't shiney like Alu but a darker colour. A full copper plate would be crazy. I'd need to get hold of some copper though and talk mate into doing it. I got him to knock up some brackets for the OCZ XTC cooler so that it would fit on the taller Corsair Dominator RAM but I'd have to do some sweet talking to get him to do this as well, he'd have to do it in his own time.

[roofsniper]

would be nice and look really cool but i bet it will be expensive. and performance wise it sounds like it might work but who knows. there really isn't anything removing the heat. its just being spread across the plate without even heatpipes. it would need decent airflow to work.

[rangerone7669]

i just wanted to chime in on me experience with my 4870.

like most everyone else i yanked off my stock cooling. replaced it with a hr03-gt with ramsinks on the ram. then i started getting black screen crashes.

i started having trouble right away while running full load in furmark and some games. so i dug through my junk box and found some more sinks. put them on and it helped some, but didn't completely eliminate the problem.

my solution was to sink everything i could get a sink to stick to. i forgot to take pics once i had fans mounted so i painted them in.


By rangerone7669, shot with Photosmart M415 at 2008-11-12

these little things i outlined here seemed to be the culprits on my card. once i sinked them my vrm temps dropped and i stopped getting black screen crashes. i dont know what they are, but on my card they got very hot.


By rangerone7669, shot with N95 8GB at 2008-11-12

this screen cap is running F@H and the game silkroad online. the game is not the most demanding, but it's a 3d game none the less.


By rangerone7669 at 2008-11-12

[sf rich]

Rangerone -
- what sinks are you using in that pic?
- how did you get your sinks to stick to those little thingies you outlined in red?

[rangerone7669]

some of the sinks are the ones that came with my hr03, some zalmans, the long straight finned ones i got at compusa. they(stright finned) were supposed to be for desktop ram, but i've been reusing them over and over.

most of the sinks are just using the sticky tape that comes on them originally. some i just put a bit of mx-2 on them and a tiny dot of super glue near the corner to get them to stick.

zalman blue's are the sinks i used on the outlined chips that were giving my troubles.

[sf rich]

rangerone -- thanks for the info

how do you get the sinks off after you use the super glue?

[Reckless187]

Cheers rangerone, will give it a try once I can be arsed to take the GPU out the case again. I'm well impressed with this card and the framerates I'm getting with this card but the overheating, which was occuring even before I took off the stock cooler, is a PITA.

[rangerone7669]

rangerone -- thanks for the info

how do you get the sinks off after you use the super glue?

i just use a tiny bit of super glue. usually a very light tap pops them free. other times i have to use my circiut freeze spay to freeze them to pop free.

keep in mind super glue sticks to the parts afterwards, makes getting good contact with heatsinks. so if you pull it off and need to reattach you may need to sand down some superglue residue.

1 more thing. super glue is not the ideal thing to use here. i've used it before in a pinch and it worked ok. but it can bite back if your not carefull. the best thing would be to just use thermal tape or epoxy.

[roofsniper]

so it seems like using a hairdryer with a razor blade and 91% isopropyl alcohol is the best way in removing the ram sinks on the card right?

[roofsniper]

SUCCESS!

so i have finally went back and put the stock plate onto the card. first thing i recognized was on startup the vrms were at 40C instead of their usual 60C. my ram was at 63C instead of its usual 50C tho. i used lost planet to test on load and typically before i was getting 115C on the vrms then i just quit the program. now the vrms hit around 70C on load which is nice. the ram went up to 90C tho but im sure that is still within a reasonable temperature although it is high. i also recognized my shader core was 5C higher than the gpu temperature but that should be unrelated to this stock plate change.

one problem i ran into tho was the fact that my t-rad wouldn't work with the stock plate. i had to cut a section out of the stock plate around where the heatpipes on the t-rad are. so now that i finally got it to work i am happy but the ram and shadercore issues arent great. i most likely am never going to get a custom cooler for a video card again after my past two experiences.

[colinsky]

I took the plunge and bought a full cover water block by Aquacomputer. The Aquagratix 4870. VRM temperatures are always cool, no problems there, but the actual gpu temperatures i'm seeing are terrible, i had better with air coolers!!

I want to go back to a gpu only waterblock (Swiftech MCW60) so i'll be in the same boat now, how to cool those damn vrms!

[STEvil]

i just use a tiny bit of super glue. usually a very light tap pops them free. other times i have to use my circiut freeze spay to freeze them to pop free.

keep in mind super glue sticks to the parts afterwards, makes getting good contact with heatsinks. so if you pull it off and need to reattach you may need to sand down some superglue residue.

1 more thing. super glue is not the ideal thing to use here. i've used it before in a pinch and it worked ok. but it can bite back if your not carefull. the best thing would be to just use thermal tape or epoxy.

Epoxy and Superglue are about 10x better than thermal tape.