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Cooling a Radeon 7500 in a cube |
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Written by Anthony King
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Wednesday, 02 June 2004 |
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This mod was performed at http://homepage.mac.com/tracer302/bluecube/PhotoAlbum28.html and shows how to properly cool a radeon 7500 graphics card once installed into a cube.
Cooling the ATI Radeon 7500
Disclaimer: This
page is for reference information only. I am not responsible
for any damage you
cause to yourself or your computer.
Note: Preliminary Test Release
of this mod
Installing the ATI Radeon 7500 into the cube made a
significant improvement in video performance over
the stock ATI Rage Pro. Not only did it improve video
all around, it allows the cube to drive two displays
at one time, and with Mac OS X Jaguar(10.2) enables
Quartz Extreme. With this increase in performance
comes additional heat, lots of it. Because the 7500
was pulled from a tower, it has just a small size heatsink
installed, in fact, the heatsink on the 7500 is actually
the same size as the stock Rage Pro. That, combined
with the compactness of the cube makes getting rid
of the additional heat essential. So, how do we get
rid of this additonal heat? Install a cooling fan of
coarse :)
I cannot take credit for this idea, I originally saw
it here, but this
page only showed the completed
install and not how to do it or exactly what parts
are involved. So without further rambling, here's the
installation of a cooling fan onto the ATI Radeon 7500:
Here's the cooling fan that I used, its 35mm x 7mm
I got it from Digikey.com
Part number: 259-1092-ND
I got this small two pin connector from an old R/C
car power pack.
Solder one end of the connector to the fan, don't
forget to put the shrink tubing on first.
Here's the completed connector with shrink tubing.
I originally tried the fan without an inline resistor
to reduce the voltage and thus slow it down and
make it quiter. But it was definitely too LOUD (about
as loud as a TiBook fan on high speed,
those of you who own a TiBook know how annoying the
fan can be at high speed) at 5v so I
soldered in a 47ohm resister to slow it down a bit,
with the resistor the noise emitted is not above
my 80mm base fan(which has also been slowed down) or
my hard drive.
All shrink wrapped ready to go, for those of you who
would just like to reduce the fan speed
right away you can actually just install it while you're
installing the 2 pin connector.
Using a piece of aluminum, cut out a 45mm * 18mm rectangle
for use as a shim
I got the aluminum from Home Depot here's a part of
the label, sorry the whole label isn't there used
it for another project. For those of you that have
checked out my 7500 install you'll recognize the
piece of aluminum.
Here's how the aluminum shim and fan get attached to
the video card, using Artic Alumina
thermal adhesive.
Here's a mock up to make sure everything is a go.
Mix the adhesive 1:1 ratio and apply a small amount
to the aluminum shim.
This stuff really smells, so use it in a well ventilated
area.
After it dries(few hours), attach the shim/fan to the
memory chips with adhesive. Be careful
on the amount of adhesive used, only a little is necessary,
you don't want it to ooze out
onto the memory chip connections, although it is non
conductive.
Here's a top view of the cube, you can see here the
7mm height of the fan plus the ~2mm from the
shim make it just the right height to clear the chassis.
Here's another view from the side
And one more
The power wire will be routed around the side of the
cube where it will make connection
with it's other half. At this point you're probably
wondering where the other half of the
fan connector comes from...see the next picture.
You may have to reference the 80mm
base fan install to help clarify the picture above.
Basically the fan the going to draw 5v from the optical
drive using a splitter.
Here's the completed project
Here's what it looks like with the cube back in the
enclosure.
For the adventureous individuals out there, you can
also power the fan off the video card itself by soldering
the leads to a powerpoint of the card. I actually got
the nerve up and did it.
The resistor was changed because this power point only
puts only 3.3v, so I placed a 10 ohm
resistor inline instead of the 47 ohm from before.
So, what are the results after all this labor? Well
,using a instant read cooking thermometer
my cube runs at about 90 F in the core doing my normal
tasks of surfing and checking email,
maybe some iTunes. Measuring the air coming up at the
video card vent area reveals 100 F.
The great thing about the Sunon blower style fan that
I used is that the discharged air is
blown up and right out the the video card vent. It
doesn't just blow against the side of the
cube and increase the core temperature. And it does
this all without being noisey.
When playing Quake 3 for about 30min the core temperature
reaches about 100 F and the
video card discharge air is ~110 F. So it appears the
video card runs approximately 10
degrees hotter than the core. So the cooling fan mounted
of the video card is pumping out
10 degrees hotter air out the the cube's video card
area. Without this fan the cube would
quickly soak up heat there. As stated above this page
is still in progress. I hope to have more
pictures and temperature readings soon. I recently
bought and installed an nVidia GeForce 3
and have been running it for the past two days. This
card runs HOT, I've measure ~122 F
with this card just doing my normal surfing and e-mail,
I can't imagine how much hotter it
would get playing Quake. Not to mention the cooling
fan is quite noisey to me. When time
permits I will be testing and documenting the ATI Rage
Pro, ATI 7500 with and without fan,
and the nVidia GeForce 3 in my cube for heat produced
so they came be compared. Until then......
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