nathris

I just spent the last 30 minutes risking my life just to prove that a vcool does nothing to an OC'd HD 3850 (700/900).

I started by recording the idle temps both with and without it, both registered 68'C with 60% fan usage, the highest useable setting without sounding like a vacuum cleaner (3850 cooler = teh suck), and then at 99% load, where both reached 80-81'C.

Now heres where it got dangerous, while it was still under load I took the vcool off of it's brackets and tried positioning it around the video card at various positions and both sucking and blowing, I kept it in the same spot for about 1 minute each time, and the only changes I had were where it was working against the fan, when the temperature jumped up to 83'C. It didn't matter where I put it, blowing into the heatsinks, blowing on the heatsink covering, working with the fan, blowing on top of the card, nothing would work.

I finally decided to call it quits when I accitendally touched the metal prongs on the vcool to my motherboard near the onboard audio and shorted it Luckily nothing got damaged.


So what did I learn from all of this, well

1) Don't put metal prongs on a motherboard!
2) The HD 3850 stock cooler is garbage
3) The vcool doesn't have any noticeable impact on the video card.


Right now I have it running just below the heatsinks blowing air onto it and I'm running 60'C idle (thanks to my side fan dropping the case temps and fixing my airflow) at 700/918 so I think thats it for my testing.

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kobilica

It might be crap for overclocking. Every stock cooler , on CPUs , anywhere , is not meant for overclocking.

Just add one fan to keep wind on GPUs fan. That should help.

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I am 110% Genius.What about you?

Sorry,there is no link to test out.

nathris

Well it seems to working ok so far, all I wanted it to do was circulate, which it seems to be doing now. I took the bottom cover off of the fan so that it sucks air directly from the bottom of the case, pushes some of it through the cooling fins where it gets pushed back out from stock fan, back to the bottom of the case where it either gets sucked back into the fins by the vcool or out the front of the case from my HDD fan.

Its been running 72-73'C under full load for the last 20 minutes at (702/918) and no artifacts or anything. Mind you I do have my window cracked open, and the back of my case pointed directly at it but its still good results. When I first got my 3850 my airflow was so bad that I managed to reach 95'C at stock settings! The vcool dropped that by a good 15 degrees simply by improving the airflow, and when I rewired my case it just diminished the role of the vcool.

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nathris

Update: I'm testing another OC right now, 730/918, its at 75C full load going on 12 minutes ATItool which is nice, but I can't push the memory any higher without it locking my system

I think I've figured out my temp problems as well: the stock cooler doesn't work less than 60% fan speed, like I said earlier it just keeps increasing logarithmically untill some constant determined by the SHC of the heat sink.

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