MSI 6600GT cooling dilemna - advice please

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jhokie

Limp Gawd
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Jan 23, 2005
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Let me preface this by saying that I have already purchased one 6600GT from newegg, which ran at 82 C+ while testing the card with World of Warcraft, until the card subsequently died from overheating while I was running a quake 3 timedemo at max details and full anti-aliasing/anisotropic filtering. So, I RMAed that card, and I have received a second MSI 6600GT.

In early testing with World of Warcraft I have found that this card runs slightly cooler than the previous card generally, at around 75-76 C most of the time, but when I enabled 8X anti-aliasing and max details, I noticed that card spiking up to 80 C. I have turned off the AA and filtering since then since I am afraid of what may happen.

When i took the new card out of the bag, I glanced at the cooling connection, and it looks to me from the outside that the thermal tape looks kinda crappily connected, possibly even slightly torn. So, my question is, what should I do? I've already RMAed one card, and I need to decide what I'm going to do with regards to this one. Should I remove the cooling unit, remove the thermal tape, and then apply some thermal grease instead? If so, what brand of thermal grease should I use? Would doing this noticably void my warranty if something were to go awry?

My second option I guess, is just to throw everything possible at the card, max AA and details, and just see if it can hold up over a prolonged period.

If anyone has any advice as to what I should do, I would really appreciate it, I'm not sure if Newegg would let me RMA the card a second time. Thanks for any responses.

Note: I've posted this in the Nvidia specific forum as well but since I wasnt getting any responses I thought I would try here.
 
You use this on your 6600GT? Just checking because the product link only mentions 6800 cards. Thanks.
 
Jesus my eyes are going bad. 6800GT is what I have it on. erg
 
You know, if I were you, I'd start out just by applying some thermal compound. That tape CAN'T be good. But, are you sure there's tape on the GPU? Even the 6800s come with tape on the memory, but, if you have tape on the GPU, MSI is really ripping people off and it's no wonder you have temperature problems... Anyway, as usual, Arctic Silver 5 is the best for the core, and I think I've heard that the Arctic silver brand ceramique is better for the memory. Most important of all is to go from crappy tape to even semi-decent compound. I mean, I'm just using a bit of the silver colored (if it has any real silver at all, it's comparable to an older AS, at most 3) cheap junk that came with the card mixed just a tad with some white stuff that came with the last IceBerq cooler I got because there wasn't enough to go around and it was a little dry. I once set the GPU voltage to 1.4V and oced up to 425MHz and saw a max load temperature of 51C (ok, NV5 silencer, but, still.) I did all that because I didn't have any AS5 and was too cheap and in a hurry to buy any anyway, but, I say that pretty well proves it's not QUITE as important as you might think. Now, if going to thermal paste doesn't help by much, you might need the difference you get from using the best choices because, while the difference isn't huge, it may well be the difference between a RMA in a few months and it lasting for years.

If you do need a new cooler, I don't know whether the NV Silencer 5 would fit on a 6600 GT without directly comparing them, but, I would assume not. They make a NV Silencer 6, which fits the PCI-express model of the 6600/6600GT, but, if you have AGP, you may be stuck for a little while longer. That AGP bridge makes it harder since it changes the layout of the card a bit and it has to be kept cool as well (should be more heat sensitive than the memory by far even.) If there is a solution for AGP users just yet, I didn't run into it, but, I admit I haven't looked very hard.
 
Thanks for the response, Nazo. Here's a link to anandtech which found some problems with the MSI card:

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2295&p=9

So if I remove the heatsink and put the arctic silver 5, should I put it on the memory as well as the gpu itself? If I didn't do that, would I have to apply more thermal tape anyway, since it would rip when pulling the cooling unit off? So would a 3.5 g tube be sufficient for both the memory and the GPU? Newegg is selling that for about 7 bucks, and that's alot better than getting the NV silencer 6 for 30++ dollars (yes my card is pcie).

Thanks for your help.
 
Looking back at my previous posts when my first card died I found and interesting response by Crashman....

"I'm running a EVGA Geforce 6800 GT pci-e. Per the techs at EVGA, pci-e cads due run hoter than their AGP brethren. However, they don't like to see the card get above the 78-82 C range under load. Mine idles at 61-65 C and under load hits high 80's...even 90C. I had a new card sent to me and it hits the same temps. The core slowdown threshold for the pci express cards is set at 135 C as opposed to 120 for AGP cards."

So if this is true, either EVGA is using a similiarly bad cooling solution as MSI, or they're both using trashy thermal tape. I know that the 6600GT series is currently the highest clocked card on the market, but I still don't see why manufacturers can't get their act together and get these cards running nicely lower than 70 C under load. It really shouldn't be that hard, and I think they're doing a disservice to the consumers, by limiting the life on these cards. I guess I'll just have to stay away from using 8X anti-aliasing with the card (since my temp is higher when I do this), which isn't so bad I guess, since a 6600GT probably isn't fast enough anyway. 2xQ looks pretty good in World of Warcraft anyway.

So, I think I'm going to contact MSI tech support and find out if applying some thermal grease is going to void my warranty. If not, I'm probably going to do it.
 
I think it does void your warantee. However, if they used cheap thermal tape on the GPU itself (as I suspect you're saying,) I guess you'll be RMAing until you end up with a newer card that they will obviously already be making this very minute if not sooner WITHOUT thermal tape because that's just moronic. Well, there used to be thermal tape that could be applied to CPUs even, but, it didn't come WITH the CPUs. The point being that anything coming with something like this will be the ultimate in cheapness.

If you do apply arctic silver, ideally you will want to remove all the thermal tape and apply the AS5 even to the memory. It's better than thermal tape, just you have to use more thermal compound on the memory since it sits lower than the GPU (all the pressure is on the GPU since it's the most sensitive thing.) A little thermal compound goes a long way, so you should be able to get by. Heck, I started with a dab of silver stuff barely covering my CPU and added the absolute minimum physically possible amount of white stuff to cover the GPU and the memory. Most AGP 6800GTs run the memory at 900MHz apparently, so I think I'm doing pretty well in that respect. The GPU, well... 450MHz is NWN stable, 425 Doom 3 stable. I'd say that the tiny amount of that stuff I used is quite sufficient.

I suspect that the reason the AGP version is more heat sensitive is that AGP bridge. That thing can get rather warm and it's affecting the GPU. Well, I guess you could try underclocking if all else fails.

All I can say is, next time, buy from a higher quality brand. Maybe leadtek, I don't know, just, higher quality...

EDIT: Bah, AGP 6800s don't have an AGP bridge. I was thinking of the 6600s, but, you specificially said 6600. Don't know why the PCI-E 6800 can run hotter then.
 
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