Any way to kill the noise of SLI chipsets?

Matrices

Supreme [H]ardness
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Feb 5, 2003
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Most of these boards come with shitty tiny fans on the SLI chipset. If you turn them off, your chipset fries. You can't install a big heatsink because the video card is always in the way. So what the hell do you do? Is it possible to run the fan on a rheobus - in other words, does the chipset only produce a lot of heat in gaming situations?
 
I know that gentlemen, but evga has a deal where you can get 7800gt plus their mobo for 380. Right now I have a 7800gt and the abit coming in and am considering cancelling - it's 445.

I mean I don't want to spend 60 freaking dollars for a stupid chipset fan issue. I just need to know if it produces little enough heat during non-gaming situations that I could turn the fan off except when gaming.
 
Heres what you do. Go to any technology parts store (that preferably sells PC Accessories) buy a Vantec Chipset cooler. That alone will sound lots better than the stock one, and if your really insane crazy about sound you can get a Vantec Rheobus (fan controller) to turn it down more.
 
Black-Falcon said:
Heres what you do. Go to any technology parts store (that preferably sells PC Accessories) buy a Vantec Chipset cooler. That alone will sound lots better than the stock one, and if your really insane crazy about sound you can get a Vantec Rheobus (fan controller) to turn it down more.
Good alternative, but it's still fan-based.

The heatpipe solutions from Asus and Abit seem to work pretty well.
 
granted brother, but i'm not paying 60 dollars for a freaking heatpipe on my chipset. rather just run the fan off my fanbus.
 
What about zalman northbridge passive coolers? Or will they not cool well enough for a nforce4 northbridge?
(I would give you a link but the site always says zalmanusa at the top)
 
it's a question of whether it will fit. those zalman tall blue things probably won't work at least with the evga because the stupid chipset is located practically underneath the first video card slot. anyway I went with some ventec copper contraption that looks to be the same height as the stock cooler, but hopefully better fan and build quality. guess i'll find out next week when it gets here.

and yes i am sensitive to noise, the stock fans on the gpus themselves drive me utterly insane. i shut them off and slap 92mm low rpm fans on the heatsinks instead.
 
oo I see.
Yeah, those stupid 40-60mm fans drive me nuts.
Passive video card, passive chipset... noisy hard drive :mad: lol
 
Matrices said:
it's a question of whether it will fit. those zalman tall blue things probably won't work at least with the evga because the stupid chipset is located practically underneath the first video card slot. anyway I went with some ventec copper contraption that looks to be the same height as the stock cooler, but hopefully better fan and build quality. guess i'll find out next week when it gets here.

and yes i am sensitive to noise, the stock fans on the gpus themselves drive me utterly insane. i shut them off and slap 92mm low rpm fans on the heatsinks instead.
you can mod those little heatsinks to work w/ your cards. its just aluminum, so its easily bendable, or even cuttable. just wack off the aluminum 'sticks,' or bend them out of the way.

thats what im gonna be doing w/in a few weeks when i bother to order the zalman cooler (on a DFI SLI-DR)
 
yeah but those zalman passives are not going to be enough to cool the SLI anyway. short of a waterblock/heatpipe you need some active cooling somehow. Don't know that a waterblock would fit, depending on the board I guess...but you can't just buy a heatpipe solution. You have to buy a board that has one.

The cheapest one is the Abit KN8 SLI for $115. Not bad at all, unless you also need to get a 7800 GT like me, in which case the eVGA combo deal is the way to go ($380 for both).

For some fucked up reason there are no reviewers of the KN8 and no explanation of how it differs from AN8 or why it even exists...
 
Matrices said:
For some fucked up reason there are no reviewers of the KN8 and no explanation of how it differs from AN8 or why it even exists...
I have an AN8 vanilla with the standard fan cooling solution.
looking on abit's site there are no Qoutes or whatever they call them. Basically they are two 40mm fans that are shrouded with plastic. Its ducted to the mosfets and its supposed to blow air over the mosfets heatsink during high load times like gaming. Do they work? dunno i havent looked at temps to see if they make a diff. The red LED lights are nice tho.
 
is it just me? or am I the only person that doesn't even notice the noise from the chipset fan?

does running SLI make it that much hotter?

iirc mine is running ~45C with the fan at like 10 or 20 percent
 
Matrices said:
it's a question of whether it will fit. those zalman tall blue things probably won't work at least with the evga because the stupid chipset is located practically underneath the first video card slot. anyway I went with some ventec copper contraption that looks to be the same height as the stock cooler, but hopefully better fan and build quality. guess i'll find out next week when it gets here.

and yes i am sensitive to noise, the stock fans on the gpus themselves drive me utterly insane. i shut them off and slap 92mm low rpm fans on the heatsinks instead.


I have the vantec copper chipset cooler on my asus a8n-sli board, after a little bit of filing aorund the outside of the holes it fits very nicely and does a great job and is reasonably quiet when plugged into the mobo header.
 
AMD T-type said:
is it just me? or am I the only person that doesn't even notice the noise from the chipset fan?

does running SLI make it that much hotter?

iirc mine is running ~45C with the fan at like 10 or 20 percent
You've got something else in your box that is louder than the chipset fan.

edit: aj@x, how much filing did you have to do?
 
i have two ultras with nv5, so big. i use a copper vantec low profile chipset cooler, which is very qioet, and cools very well. my chipset at max load is about 31c.
f
 
freddiepm61 said:
i have two ultras with nv5, so big. i use a copper vantec low profile chipset cooler, which is very qioet, and cools very well. my chipset at max load is about 31c.
f

How do you find the chipset temp?
 
AMD T-type said:
is it just me? or am I the only person that doesn't even notice the noise from the chipset fan?

does running SLI make it that much hotter?

iirc mine is running ~45C with the fan at like 10 or 20 percent

iam at ur same boat... can't hear mine at all
 
_Korruption_ said:
You've got something else in your box that is louder than the chipset fan.

edit: aj@x, how much filing did you have to do?


Hardly any filing it was just to safely clear a cap that's all
;)
 
wow I'd LOVE to have nice "low" temps like you guys are. (30's and 40's C) My poor SLI-DR's chipset (with two 6800U's stock cooled exhausing onto it) runs ~55C idle and low 60's load.
 
i changed my dfi nf4 sli board's chipset fan with a evercool vc-re
then I kept it at a constant 3000rpms with smart guardian.

can't hear it all, it now idles at around 37-41C
 
yeah, but he (madshrimps) used a 6600GT video card :( I highly doubt this will clear my 6800GT with the NV5 silencer installed, and I don't have the stock heatsink/fan for the vid card. I wonder if anything short of the dangerden maze 4 will clear that big ass fan. Anyone got any experiences to share? Oh perhaps I should mention I have the Asus A8N-sli deluxe with a dead northbridge fan and I don't look forward to repeatedly changing the HSF with regularity.
 
Ronbo said:
yeah, but he (madshrimps) used a 6600GT video card :( I highly doubt this will clear my 6800GT with the NV5 silencer installed, and I don't have the stock heatsink/fan for the vid card. I wonder if anything short of the dangerden maze 4 will clear that big ass fan. Anyone got any experiences to share? Oh perhaps I should mention I have the Asus A8N-sli deluxe with a dead northbridge fan and I don't look forward to repeatedly changing the HSF with regularity.


um ok. Since this is your first posting in this thread how exactly was I suppose to know these things? Bitching at a suggestion when you did not ask for the suggestion is just wrong. Much less I don't really care what kind of card you have, the thread started asked for a suggestion, I in turn offered a solution that seems to work.

if you dont like my suggestions, well I just don't care all that much. :rolleyes:
 
I was just making an observation, not bitching at anyone. sorry if you took my post the wrong way. I'm just looking for a solution that will work without ordering parts 3 or 4 times is all.
 
that vantec thing works brilliantly, it is quiet, runs cool and is very simple to put on.
it works so well as it is pure copper, with a large low rpm low cfm fan.
however perhaps one of the ways that i got my temps so low is using as5. this dropped my temps by a out 6c at load.
i.e. get this and all will work well. had it running for about 7 months and still going strong.
good luck
f
 
A8N-SLI w/ Zalman NB47J passive cooler, it's quiet, and fits with 2 XFX 7800GTX's.
 
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