I recently purchased a mid range video card that I caught on a manager's special at Best Buy ($40). With the release this month of ATI's HD4800 series, my HD2600 Pro is officially two generations old, but the price was right and it's a big step up from the on board graphics my system was previously running.
I ran some benchmarks on Company of Heroes and found that I was on the borderline of being able to use the higher settings at my monitor's native 1680x1050 resolution. With my previous Dell system I was able to play this game at 1024x768 with all settings on low and thought the graphics were decent for my needs. I didn't know what I was missing until I saw the game with higher detail, anti-aliasing, shadows and reflections enabled.
Since the card didn't represent a huge investment, I decided to experiment with some overclocking. This is something I had been wanting to try if the opportunity came up. Using RivaTuner and a trusty Maximum PC article as a guide, I was able to take the core clock speed up 30% from 600MHz to 790MHz, and the memory clock up 25% from 400MHz to 500MHz. The system ran stable, but the clock speed increase took the GPU temperature up close to 60 C while idle and over 70 C under a full load. This was a lot hotter than I was comfortable with. The small fan on the card also ran at full speed all the time and was by far the loudest part of my computer. I like the idea of my system working hard, but sounding like it's not.
This prompted me to try upgrading the heat sink/fan with a quieter and cooler-running aftermarket model.
After reading a few reviews, I picked up the Zalman VF700-AlCu at Fry's based first on price and second on performance. On the one hand, it might seem impractical to spend $25 on a cooler for a $40 video card, but on the other hand I end up with a cool and quiet card that performs at nearly the level of the next model up. I also got the satisfaction of modifying the card myself to appeal to the hobbyist in me.
If you're interested in the upgrade process, read on.
- I first removed the stock cooler by taking out the four screws securing the heat sink to the circuit board. This revealed the bare GPU die and four of the eight RAM chips.
- I used ArctiClean thermal material remover and thermal surface purifier to clean the die to a mirror finish. Then I applied a very thin layer of Arctic Silver to get the best possible heat transfer from the die to the heat sink.
The difficulty came when I found out that the "Fits latest VGA cards!" claim on the new heat sink packaging involved a drill in my case. I don't know whether to blame VisionTek or Zalman for this. The video card had pre-drilled holes that matched the heatsink mounting bracket, but they were about a millimeter in size and there wasn't a prayer of getting even the small screws that came with the cooler through them. Obviously, Visiontek didn't anticipate many customers taking this route on a low end card.
- After removing the fan from the heat sink, I drilled new (and not pretty, I might add) holes in both mounting brackets to match the bigger holes in the board. It was definitely a retrofit, (or more like a "Ghettrofit"), but it worked.
- I installed the self-adhesive RAM heat sinks, then installed the cooler, alternating turns between mounting screws to get a level contact between the chip and the metal. After reinstalling the video card, I was pleased to see the GPU temps drop by around 10 C under both idle and full load conditions. The larger fan is also much quieter, even at full speed. The one side effect I hadn't considered, is that the temperatures of everything else in my system went up by a few degrees since the heat was being drawn away more effectively from the video card. The final product also took up another PCI slot as I had expected.
- With the overclocked settings, the video card was running at much more comfortable temperatures. I tested the card by playing Crysis at medium settings for a few hours at 1680x1050 resolution. After an hour or so, I did have one video display hang, followed by a blank screen. I rebooted and dropped the core clock one notch to 784 MHz and haven't had a problem since. The game play was noticeably smoother at lower resolutions, but I didn't expect much more for the price I paid on such a demanding game. Most other games should run fine at this resolution with higher settings. The final setup fit the bill.
