Cooling the R300

[mboeller]

found this link at Rage3D :

http://www.frostytech.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=1288

As it seems the cooling of the R300 is below standard.

[Colourless]

From [H]ard|OCP the otherday:

R300 Shim Editorial:
The FrostyTech fellas are fired up over the R300 shim that surrounds the base of the GPU. Now, before I go any further, I am not really sure what the “problem” is since ATi designed their cards to work with a TIM. Thermal Interface Material is mucho thick, and the added space is actually needed. The problem lies in the fact that end users who use thermal compound run into heating issues.

To put it bluntly, there is problem with the ATI R300 processor package that impacts just how well heatsinks can cool on the Radeon 9700 Pro. This copper shim is glued to the surface of the PCB, and if it were installed flush to the height of the silicon core, it would actually be very useful. Unfortunately, the problem is that the copper shim is actually slightly thicker than the silicon core by about 0.0023". This makes it impossible for the flat bottomed heatsink ATI use to actually come in contact with the R300 core for optimal cooling.

I am not sure where I stand on this…I simply lapped the surrounding shim until it was flat with the core, end of problem. But people who don’t check clearances first might end up with bad cooling when they replace the TIM with paste.

[BRiT]

You know what? They're twits. They did all that work for a mere 2.3 degrees C difference. I wouldn't say ATI's cooling is below standard.


So what can we make of all this? Well, the difference in temperature between a flush mounted stock heatsink and one which sits above the core (with standard white silicon heatsink compound) is pretty marginal.

[jvd]

Its a waste. Ati designed the heatsink and card to play games for hours at a time at a certian temp. I think the millions they spent on it would have found the best cooling for what they needed over the ten bucks a website put into it


(btw can we get a spell check on these boards . My spelling sucks)