8800gs cooling help

[RobTi]

Hi all had to get one of these as my old 7800gtx got broken, now is this noisy , so i am looking for any solutions to help cool it on air it is at the moment in my htpc and its driving me nuts
Thanks
Robert

[Blaineoliver]

Tried blowing some compressed air though it incase dust is cloggin it up? if that fails you need a aftermarket cooler.

[colmo]

I have the Gainward 8800GS - I removed the stock fan (leaving the heatsink in place), and strapped on a 80mm case fan with cable ties! Takes up a lot of space, but I don't use the other slots in my PC.

[CK_1985]

Depending on how much space you have and how good your airflow is, it may be possible for you to go down the passive cooling route - I had a heavily overclocked 8800GT running on passive cooling and it was absolutely fine. Granted that was in a midi tower case but it was certainly no windtunnel in there!

[sammorris]

The 8800GS isn't a particularly high-heat card in the grand scheme of things. Something like a Thermalright HR-03GT with a low speed 92mm fan such as a Nexus or Antec TriCool would work a treat.

[RobTi]

Thanks for the help
I have plenty of room so to start will remove the fan and try passive (i assume that this will be okay as long as the temps stay low) then try the larger fan strapped on, question how do i monitor temps and what are safe temps to work with?
Thanks
Robert

[Queelis]

GPU-Z reports temperatures fine. Me personally, I wouldn't like temps to exceed some 70C degrees, but for passive 80 would be acceptable.. kinda.

[sammorris]

I'll willingly accept up to about 90ºC at stabilised load (i.e. under heavy load for an hour plus). Any more than that is pushing it.

[Infinite]

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/AKASA...e-BLUE-LED-fan

The Akasa Neo is a bargain atm. Under 12 quid for a really good cooler.

[RobTi]

Thaks everyone for the help, went the route of replacing the fan with a 90mm cpu cooler fan that i had connected to the mb header so at 7 volts i am getting 53*c at idle and no noise will try this for a while as its in a htpc should run okay
Thanks
Robert

[sammorris]

If you don't play games on the system, 53ºC idle is more than acceptable.

[JordanWillis]

I used to have the XFX alpha dog version and it was a very good card. It was also loud as the fan was locked at 100%. There are two ways to get this sorted. If you have the card registered with whoever you got it from you can ask them to send you a fan adapter like I did. They sent me one for free and it worked.

The other option is to buy aftermarket cooling for the card.

[sammorris]

Or buy a bracketless 3-pin fan splitter off ebay for £2 like I did and hook it up to a fan controller. I initially tried running it variable, but after neglecting to change the fan speeds and suffering no ill effects I wired it straight to a 5V switch (Zalman ZM-MFC1) and load temps were still only 68ºC.