Hercules Radeon 8500LE and ZM17-cu temps

They make noise, too.

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chefren
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Joined: Mon Dec 01, 2003 10:02 am

Hercules Radeon 8500LE and ZM17-cu temps

Post by chefren » Mon Dec 01, 2003 10:09 am

I just replaced the stock fan on my Hercules 8500LE card with a Zalman ZM17-Cu. Everything seems to work fine and my pc is more quiet, but when I put the case temp sensor in between the fins of the new HS it gives me temps between 45 (idle) and 58 (playing NWN). I have a Chieftec dragon case with a side fan running at 5V. I thought the side case fan would cool the Zalman hs, but the temps under load seem a little borderline to me. The Radeon chip is at best as hot as the hs fins (or my physics knowledge is really rusty). What do you think? Should I try running the side fan at a higher voltage?

SometimesWarrior
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Post by SometimesWarrior » Mon Dec 01, 2003 3:31 pm

Hi chefren, welcome to SPCR!

I don't think anyone here (or anywhere outside of the ATI hardware development team) really knows what constitutes an "acceptable" video card temperature for the 8500. Every GPU and CPU has its own heat tolerance, and every temperature measuring setup has its own quirks, so there's no way to say, just by looking at the numbers, whether your temperatures are too high.

Basically, if you can play your 3D games without any screen glitches, your video card is adequately cooled. That's what it comes down to. ;) So, if your games run perfectly, I say you needn't touch the fan. In fact, if that side fan is making any noise, you could try turning it off completely and running a 3DMark benchmark loop for an hour or so. If you don't get any screen glitches after that torture test, you're doing fine.

If you ever find the "breaking point" of your card (what temperature the core is when you start seeing screen glitches), then you can set up your fans to keep the chip from reaching that temperature. That's when temperature monitoring becomes useful, after you've figured out what temperature really is "too high".

Still, most people agree that running components at a high temperature can shorten their lifespan, and so most people use quiet cooling even when it's not absolutely necessary. I have an old Athlon heatsink on my Geforce3, and I can run the card for hours without a fan, but the heatsink gets scalding hot. For safety and longetivity reasons, I have a silent 5V fan pointed at the heatsink.

Sorry for all the "quotes"! I hope that, somewhere in this post, I answered your question. :P

chefren
Posts: 7
Joined: Mon Dec 01, 2003 10:02 am

Post by chefren » Mon Dec 01, 2003 10:57 pm

Thank you for your answer! My 2 case fans are not disturbingly noisy at 5V, in fact they seem to drown in the noise from my cpu fan (1500rpm, 80mm Nexus) and suspended hdd. After these improvements as well as installing the Acoustipack standard and using a fortron- based 350W ps, I can now finally call my computer quiet (but not yet silent). I'm still going to get a more quiet hard disk, the old one is a 30GB, 5400 rpm Maxtor which makes some idle noise even when suspended. Also there is some whine from the combined air flow of my four fans.

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