The masters rebuild entire cases out of bits and pieces; us ordinary mortals have to make do with lesser accomplishments.
When I got my current box it came with a GF 6800; a competent upper mid-range card at the time (and still pretty strong). It had nice overclock potential I quickly noticed, but was seriously hampered by the terrible fan/heatsink delivered as standard. Not only was it very noisy, cooling was extremely poor as well. Hence, it was quickly replaced with a Zalman VF700 (or so I think it's called; it's the copper flower-thing VGA sink). This did much to improve both temps and overclocking, as well as noise level with the fan running at 5V using Zalman's pack-in power divider.
Lately however I'd been thinking of replacing the Zalman standard 3-prong power connector with the card's original heatsink power cable. It would be a simple matter of desoldering it since I kept the sink in case I needed to put it back for whatever reason (warranty issues, etc). Doing this operation would enable the variable fanspeed feature of more modern NV cards, and considering the Zalman's fan even running full tilt is a much larger diameter and slower spinning unit compared to the dentist-drill-pitched original fan, the added noise would probably not make much of a difference. Particulary while gaming.
So I went ahead and did it. Unfortunately I lacked the neccessary small-diameter starshaped screwdriver to disassemble the original heatsink without damaging it, so I had to use a set of pliers and snip metal and plastic apart to get to the fan. Luckily I already own a smalltipped soldering iron suitable for electronics, so that bit went very quickly and easily. Both fans used the same wiring scheme and coloring, black for ground on the left and red for +12V in the middle (sensor wire on the right, though unused on my NV card so the original cable lacks that wire and is hence just a 2-pin connector), it was a piece of cake really. I also took the time to vacuum out the heatsink thoroughly, as it had been rather badly clogged with dust (responsible for roughly 3C core temp increase over a couple months' time).
I reassembled everything, then powered up my system. Fan started spinning merrily, and speed variation was possible using rivatuner. Still, I suspect the 3D detection will have issues when switching in and out of programs just like rivatuner's overclocking does, so I may have to peg the fan at full tilt constantly to get the full effect, I don't know yet. Still, when sitting on WoW's login screen with a fullscreen 1280 4xAA window, I now get about 71-72C core temp instead of the blistering 89-90C with the fan at 5V...! WoW is particulary bad here, because it loads the GPU highly on the animated title screen whilst not hitting the CPU much, meaning the system intake fan does not revv up much. Hence the high GPU temp. Fan noise increase is almost inaudible when the case is closed back up I might add. The VF700 really rules!
On the whole, a very simple and quite worthwile operation that I thoroughly recommend other Zalman owners perform as well. At least if they possess the required tools and basic soldering skill... Now I will do some experimentation and see if I can push core clock even higher than 420.
When I got my current box it came with a GF 6800; a competent upper mid-range card at the time (and still pretty strong). It had nice overclock potential I quickly noticed, but was seriously hampered by the terrible fan/heatsink delivered as standard. Not only was it very noisy, cooling was extremely poor as well. Hence, it was quickly replaced with a Zalman VF700 (or so I think it's called; it's the copper flower-thing VGA sink). This did much to improve both temps and overclocking, as well as noise level with the fan running at 5V using Zalman's pack-in power divider.
Lately however I'd been thinking of replacing the Zalman standard 3-prong power connector with the card's original heatsink power cable. It would be a simple matter of desoldering it since I kept the sink in case I needed to put it back for whatever reason (warranty issues, etc). Doing this operation would enable the variable fanspeed feature of more modern NV cards, and considering the Zalman's fan even running full tilt is a much larger diameter and slower spinning unit compared to the dentist-drill-pitched original fan, the added noise would probably not make much of a difference. Particulary while gaming.
So I went ahead and did it. Unfortunately I lacked the neccessary small-diameter starshaped screwdriver to disassemble the original heatsink without damaging it, so I had to use a set of pliers and snip metal and plastic apart to get to the fan. Luckily I already own a smalltipped soldering iron suitable for electronics, so that bit went very quickly and easily. Both fans used the same wiring scheme and coloring, black for ground on the left and red for +12V in the middle (sensor wire on the right, though unused on my NV card so the original cable lacks that wire and is hence just a 2-pin connector), it was a piece of cake really. I also took the time to vacuum out the heatsink thoroughly, as it had been rather badly clogged with dust (responsible for roughly 3C core temp increase over a couple months' time).
I reassembled everything, then powered up my system. Fan started spinning merrily, and speed variation was possible using rivatuner. Still, I suspect the 3D detection will have issues when switching in and out of programs just like rivatuner's overclocking does, so I may have to peg the fan at full tilt constantly to get the full effect, I don't know yet. Still, when sitting on WoW's login screen with a fullscreen 1280 4xAA window, I now get about 71-72C core temp instead of the blistering 89-90C with the fan at 5V...! WoW is particulary bad here, because it loads the GPU highly on the animated title screen whilst not hitting the CPU much, meaning the system intake fan does not revv up much. Hence the high GPU temp. Fan noise increase is almost inaudible when the case is closed back up I might add. The VF700 really rules!
On the whole, a very simple and quite worthwile operation that I thoroughly recommend other Zalman owners perform as well. At least if they possess the required tools and basic soldering skill... Now I will do some experimentation and see if I can push core clock even higher than 420.
