Those of you with Arctic Coolers and overclockin

[BenW]

I've had an ATI1 silencer on my radeon 9800Pro for probably about a year now. It was noisier than i wanted so i've looked at alternatives.

The alternative is now installed! It's a thermaltake schooner, i know you dont like thermaltake but carry on reading!

It looks like this:



Obviously its a fanless design which means it needs to get heat out in a way other than a fan moving air over it. It does this using heatpipes to connect front and back heatsinks and also a heatpipe coming out of the pci slot under the card with a mini heatsink outside the case. Whilst running ati tool overclocking it got HOT, hotter than my fanless xp120 gets under load. Theres little airflow over the card itself but ati tool reports very similar temps to those of the arctic silencer.

Now for overclocking. For this i used ati tray tools which as far as i can see is similar to ati tools.

Arctic cooler with supplied thermal paste got this:
Core - 413
Mem - 357

Thermaltake Schooner, assembled purely with arctic silver 5 got this:
Core - 416
Mem - 369

So as you can see the schooner gets better overclocks, similar temps (Slightly higher) and its totally silent

So to those of you who want to overclock your card i would recommend this silent cooler over the arctic silencer range. I'd be pretty sure this gets more heat outside the case than the arctic cooler does too

It can be had cheapest at eclipse online, got mine from KustomPCs because i was ordering other parts from them at the same time. Costs about £18 at eclipse and £24.59 at Kustom!

So go and buy one

[Jonny]

And how easy was the fitting? Does it all fit through the PCI slot nicely?

[mike_w]

You have to remember that passive heatsinks rely on good case cooling. It also raises the ambient temperature of the case - I would still go for Arctic Cooling since it dumps the hot air outside of the case (something I wish all higher spec graphics cards would do). The heatsink on the outside is something I've never seen before - I would probably just be my normal clumsy self and snap or damage it at some point.

[StoneNewt]

hum, how does it perform with the graphics card vertical rather than horizontal?