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Why are third party coolers not so good?

Soldato
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The memory chips with aftermarket coolers seem to suffer a lot. Why are they so poor when you are paying upwards of 50+ quid? never understood it. The cooling for the GPU it's self is great, but the memory chips suffer because of the small heatsinks you get with it, so they end up much worse off than with the stock cooling.

Short of water cooling i haven't been able to find a way to make a graphics card quieter without temps being affected.

Anybody have any solutions or is it just the way it has to be for now? makes me want to water cool but i always have second thoughts because of price & hassle, well mainly the hassle.
 
Associate
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in the tower
If you're spending "upwards of £50" you're doing it wrong.

You may as well just get a waterblock for that money.

Water and electricity scares the crap out of me :confused: but i realise these things must be well sealed

Parts do tend to malfunction :confused: tell me different please lol
 
Soldato
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If using deionized / non-conductive premium fluid, the risks are vastly reduced. All leaks I have seen have been tiny and slow. If you're imagining a jet of water suddenly shooting out from somewhere and spraying your entire rig, or the reservoir exploding and dumping over the mobo, that doesn't happen.

Uhh anyway, third party coolers are a mixed bag. At least they're usually way better than the dreck that 1st party slaps on there.
 
Associate
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I find that VRM temp are also affected on aftermarket cooler without original plate (like 4870). More than ram. Slow rpm on 2x fan may be sufficient for gpu (a lot of pipes over whole gpu) but for little heatsink on vrm its not.
 
Soldato
OP
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If you're spending "upwards of £50" you're doing it wrong.

You may as well just get a waterblock for that money.

The arctic cooling solutions cost that and more, my point is that the memory chips get too toasty when a new cooler is supposed to do it's job.

and full cover waterblocks cant be had for 50 new unless maybe you have an old card, in fact EK blocks are more like £70.

it's rediculous you have to think about water, i guess a gpu is just harder to make coolers for.
 
Soldato
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If you're spending over £50 then would it not have been wiser just buying a vapor-x with a better cooler pre-fitted?

I would have done so, but i got my card when the 5870's first came out so they were all standard reference coolers.

if id have known they were noisy in the first place i would have waited.

Just surprised that you can't even buy a better and quieter cooler than the stock ones.
 
Caporegime
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18 Oct 2002
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I would have done so, but i got my card when the 5870's first came out so they were all standard reference coolers.

if id have known they were noisy in the first place i would have waited.

Just surprised that you can't even buy a better and quieter cooler than the stock ones.

Prolimatech, £45, I'm running full load overclocked/overvolted 5850 at 36C load, with 2x92mm fans at silent. The heatsink actually works better with 92mm fans than 120's that most reviews use as the deadspot on the 120mm fan(the bit in the middle) is much bigger on a 120mm and a lot of the airflow is not going through the heatsink while the deadspot covers large portions of the sink.

I've not actually tested the VRM temps with the included heatsink, they aren't great in reviews, but thats ONLY in furmark. With the Thermalright heatsink on the VRM's, i'm getting 70C in furmark, but only 45C load in games, furmark just gives temps you will NEVER EVER see in any game ever, its a completely useless tool because even for stability, what might make furmark crash will never crash in games.

Its expensive, but has so many mounting options it "should" fit the next gen cards, and the next gen after that, which if it does, would mean you've ended up paying about £15 for a cooler for each of 3 cards, which is cheaper than buying a Vapour x type model. Realistically the Vapour X is better than stock, but not by much, its still got high temps isn't particularly quiet and you normally wait months before 3rd party versions are out.

With the Prolimatech they are promising to bring out new mounts very quickly after launch, IF it doesn't already fit the pretty large array of mounting options it already has.

This has been my main gripe with 3rd party coolers, and non reference heatsink versions of cards, they very very very rarely come out within 3 months of launch. The Prolimatech isn't strictly speaking a 5870 cooler, but it still arrived 6 months after the card launched. The 5870/5970 Arctic cooling sinks still aren't available AFAIK. Last gen the 4870x2 Arctic cooling solution wasn't out till 7-8 months after the card was.

Waterblocks do tend to come out quite quickly for these cards, but all full cover blocks are wasted cash in terms of moving to a new card in the future and very few people want to pay extra for a 2nd hard card with a waterblock so little chance of resale.

Even worse than all of that is, the Prolimatech costs so much because its made in small numbers, if it was the default heatsink, AMD would have less failures, almost complete silence and 99% of people that buy the cards anyway only ever use one expansion slot, the vast majority of people could fit two triple slot coolers in for crossfire as a LOT of AMD boards these days, 790/890fx boards anyway, have great spacing for 3/4pci-e slots.

Blower fans and exhausting heatsinks are UTTER CRAP, 70-80C load down to 36C load with a better and quieter cooler thats only marginally bigger.

If only they did a quadfire version like the reference cards with exhausting double slot louder heatsinks in small numbers, and the "normal" version with a huge ass sink in it for the 99% of sales where the space under their GPU is completely wasted and better cooling and silence is prefered.
 
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Soldato
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drunkenmaster

The thing is, if high VRM temps may cause problems in furmark then how are you supposed to test the card on that program for non heat related problems?

I'm not sure, i think i'll wait and see what the coolit OMNI is like, if it's any good it should work well.. but it's a little while off yet.

as you say though with custom water cooling the full cover blocks have to be changed each card which becomes pricey, for now i'll see what happens over the next few months.
 
Caporegime
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drunkenmaster

The thing is, if high VRM temps may cause problems in furmark then how are you supposed to test the card on that program for non heat related problems?

I'm not sure, i think i'll wait and see what the coolit OMNI is like, if it's any good it should work well.. but it's a little while off yet.

as you say though with custom water cooling the full cover blocks have to be changed each card which becomes pricey, for now i'll see what happens over the next few months.

There IS nothing that furmark does, it will tell you the very max temps your card can reach, thats it, theres no useful data from Furmark, instability in that does not mean you'd ever have a crash in any game ever made. There are NO non heat releated problems Furmark can help with, its not a game, its not fun to watch, you can't play it, it heats up the card, in a way that CAN'T happen in games therefore its 100% useless.

Even so, I've seen no proof the stock prolimatech sink is unstable in furmark, I've certainly not seen a lick of proof its unstable in any games or can cause failures of any kind.

If you want though, as I did(needlessly) by a Thermalright VRM sink for £20, it cools better than stock VRM cooling anyway, by a margin and will give you some 40-50C lower gpu temps.

My temps are down almost 60% with the Prolimatech, its 3rd party cooling as is the thermalright sink, so I think its fair to say 3rd party cooling doesn't all suck.

Yes it costs almost the same as a full cover waterblock, which really offers no better temps to be honest. But other than the VRM sink, the main heatsink will be reusable, so its £15-20 for a VRM cooler for each gen, not great, not terrible. Still cheaper than buying a Vapourx/other crappy cooling expensive version card.
 
Soldato
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I did a google search and found the thermalright spitfire, also vrm heatsinks. So i stand corrected, did not even know that they sold vrm specific heatsinks until now :o

Problem is size, but i see it's not compatible with 5970. plus 2 cards in crossfire means you need plenty of room with 2 of those, leaving out possibility of having a huge cpu cooler like the newer noctua.

Still, it seems like a good product and does the job well from the review i found.. while it's not truely universal it does fit quite a large range of cards by the seem of it.
 
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