Arctic Cooling / ATI X800XL AGP question

[YorkieBen]

Does anyone know if any of the arctic cooling vga silencers will fit on X800XL or X800 (vanilla) AGP RIALTO cards?

Thanks

[StormPC]

They might but why would you want to do that? The X800 stock coolers are plenty quiet. It's not like they are nVidias. And if you want to vmod you should think about buying a highend card. The lowend X800's are good for the money but if you want bleeding edge performance you should consider the X800 XT PE.

[YorkieBen]

becuase I want all excess heat outside of my case, also the arctic coolers are quieter than the stock cooler imo.

[StormPC]

becuase I want all excess heat outside of my case, also the arctic coolers are quieter than the stock cooler imo.

What is more important, getting the heat out or quiet? There is no way to get "all excess heat outside" quietly.

Watercool your videocard and CPU, and use Vantec Stealth case fans. That's about the most quiet you can get. Depending on your motherboard you may have to cool your NB as well. Zalman fanless watercoolers are very quiet.

Heat inside your case is a fact of life. It will never be as cool inside as out, therefore you must compromise.

[YorkieBen]

I know all that thankyou, fact though my present graphics cards 9800 has an arctic cooler on, when I replaced the stock heatsink with the arctic cooler the noise was alot less and my case temps went down quite alot.

Also the case I want to buy soon is a Temjin TJ06 which I think for airflow purposes would really benefit from an arctic cooler equipped graphics card

and regarding watercooling, I dont want to do it for expense and safety reasons.

[Wam7]

To try and answer your question, I bought a X800pro vivo from somebody which had an Artic Cooler 3 on. I presumed it was orginally designed for the 9800.

[StormPC]

To actually answer the question, yes. You need the Artic Cooler 5 for the X800XL and X850. For the X800XT, PE and Pro the Artic Cooler 4.

[Wam7]

Well I can always show you a picture of my X800pro vivo @ XTPE with an Artic cooler 3 on it.

[StormPC]

Well I can always show you a picture of my X800pro vivo @ XTPE with an Artic cooler 3 on it.

Didn't say it wouldn't work, just that it's not the right model. The models I listed are what the manufacturer recommends. Every highend ATi card since before the 9800 Pro uses the same mounting holes (although additional holes exist on newer cards) but I don't recommend using a GPU HSF that is older than your videocard.

[Wam7]

Storm PC I totally agree with you and that's why I was suprised to see it on the X800pro vivo. I found AC4 to be not much better than stock. I would recommend the Zalman CF700-cu over any Artic Cooler as it does a MUCH better job of cooling and is pretty quiet - 5v is virtual silent and 12v is sill quieter than the stock X800... HSF. The downside for Yorkie ben is that it doesn't exhaust air, but I found the AC's to be crap at doing that anyway. Better off just having good intake, exhaust fans. Over the years I found my best air cooling to be a 120mm fan intake on the side and 2 92mm exhaust fans, 1 up top and 1 lower front. It's also fairly quiet.