Be careful with the VGA Silencer!

Mar. · Post by **Mar.** » Fri Jan 21, 2005 6:44 am

Believe it or not, I managed to crush my GPU with one when installing.... Too much torque on the screwdriver I guess.

If you put one on, good for you, they work great, but don't overtighten the screws. Go until you start getting resistance from the screws, then go a little bit more. The heatsink should be secure, so be sure of this.

SometimesWarrior · Post by **SometimesWarrior** » Fri Jan 21, 2005 6:00 pm

Ouch!! Sorry to hear it... MikeC mentioned in the reviews of the Silencers that there was no information in the instruction manual on how tight the screws should be. It sounds like Arctic Cooling needs to revise their installation instructions so fewer accidents happen.

mathias · Post by **mathias** » Fri Jan 21, 2005 7:13 pm

What card did you crush?

Callous · Post by **Callous** » Fri Jan 21, 2005 10:40 pm

Did you hear a crunching sound when it got crushed? I am just curious.

Instructions did actually say turn the screws until the rubber washers touches the card or something similar.

Mar. · Post by **Mar.** » Fri Jan 21, 2005 11:29 pm

I crushed a 9800 pro. Managed to get an AIW through an RMA though.... so it worked out in the long run. The old card couldn't OC worth crap, and this AIW 9800 pro goes far past XT speeds (but I keep it at 412/365).

No, no crunching sound.

The instructions are generally good, but they don't give any idea how tight to screw down the sink. Basically just "tight, but not too tiht." YMMV.

mathias · Post by **mathias** » Sat Jan 22, 2005 6:50 am

I've heard of 9600's getting crushed, one person crushed two of them with a zalman heatpipe. That suggested that 9600's were fragile, I thought it might have something to do with the .15 vs .13 process. But if 9800's can be crushed by a silencer(which were supposed to be much safer than ZM80's), that cast a lot of doubt an it being just the 9600 which is a fragile.

Maybe ATI cards are generally more fragile, there have been some Nvidia cards with heatspreaders, so that suggests that they're concerned about keeping them from being crushed.

KorruptioN · Post by **KorruptioN** » Sun Jan 23, 2005 12:20 pm

SometimesWarrior wrote:Ouch!! Sorry to hear it... MikeC mentioned in the reviews of the Silencers that there was no information in the instruction manual on how tight the screws should be. It sounds like Arctic Cooling needs to revise their installation instructions so fewer accidents happen.

They did say to tighten the screws to the point where the screw head is just touching and compressing the rubber washer. So that's what I did, and have never looked back. I do agree though, that the installation is not completely foolproof, and this design opens up a lot of possibilities for bad things to happen.

I even removed the shim (I was forced to, as my 9700 was one of the affect ones) and had no problems.

slipknottin · Post by **slipknottin** » Tue Jan 25, 2005 7:09 am

I just killed my 9800SE last night with the zalman ZM80D. Card still sort of functions, but can not display 3d images without wicked artifacts, and doesnt display boot messages very well. I have no idea how I cracked it, maybe getting the card into its AGP slot?

In any case, I hope newegg RMA's it. Heck, maybe Ill be lucky and the new 9800SE I get will let me open up all the pipelines.

My biggest problem right now is I cant find my old PCI video card.

mandms7 · Post by **mandms7** » Tue Jan 25, 2005 1:58 pm

Why would Newegg RMA a board that you broke? Obviouslly you didn't do it on purpose, but unless you're lying to them, I don't see how they would take that back.

slipknottin · Post by **slipknottin** » Tue Jan 25, 2005 3:32 pm

mandms7 wrote:Why would Newegg RMA a board that you broke? Obviouslly you didn't do it on purpose, but unless you're lying to them, I don't see how they would take that back.

Because there is no visible damage or any indication that I broke anything. Im still not 100% certain that it was the installation of the Zalman heatsink that broke it. The power connector was having quite a few issues, and I really had to push hard to get it in, its possible I broke the board doing that.

Mar. · Post by **Mar.** » Wed Jan 26, 2005 7:57 pm

slipknottin wrote: Because there is no visible damage or any indication that I broke anything. Im still not 100% certain that it was the installation of the Zalman heatsink that broke it. The power connector was having quite a few issues, and I really had to push hard to get it in, its possible I broke the board doing that.

You have a pm