Question about watercooling my 9800pro
 

I'm thinking about watercooling my new 9800 pro 256mb vid card, but have a quick question first. I though I remembered reading somewhere that the stock fan/heatsink combo also served as a way to cool off the memory chips, because of the air blowing off the fan... If I replace this with a waterblock am I going to have problems with stability? I don't plan on overclocking the memory much...

You can buy little heatsinks for the ram. That's what I would do.

Are you going to make your own Waterblock? If so, you could design it to have sections go off and touch the ram, so the heat transfered to the copper on the WB would be dissapated through the water. Or you could build mini WB's for those. If you aren't designing and building your own, you could just get an old Heatsink and hacksaw little pieces off.

Re: Question about watercooling my 9800pro
 

I did this to my 9700pro..
just put the BGA heatsinks on the mem..
Works fine..

Haven't got ram waterblocks done for a 9800 pro yet but the ram on it gets equally as scorching hot as the 9700 pro did in a fanless open case (using the stock VPU heatsink fan unit). The ram desperately needs some form of sinks imo, I guess small ram sinks will work ok as long as you don't intend to vmod the ram. They will still get warm or hot if you have a low airflow case or system however.

You may not need it but as I have the specs, (taken from my ATI 9800 pro), I'll post the image. Hole spacing is the same as reference Geforce 3, but you'll need either shim relief, or less favourable, shim removal.

http://www.zerofanzone.co.uk/picture...shim_specs.gif


Here's the r9800 block base with a milled recess channel to avoid shim contact. You can see the imprint of the raised core codes that have transferred to the block base showing it was / is making good full contact:-

http://www.zerofanzone.co.uk/project.../r350wc014.jpg

I was going to use one of Danger Den's GPU waterblocks. I was told the one made for the 9700 would work with a 9800. Is that correct?

It should fit the 9800, as VPU specs and holes are the same on 9700/9800 and I think the whole 9xxx range? (although I haven't owned all the cards so can't be 100% sure.

I haven't seen the Danger den block but Just check that it will avoid the shim in some way, if it doesn't, contact with the core could be poor leading to worse temps than air cooling. The 9700 had a "chewing gum" Tim to fill any gap which was a poor way to do it. The 9800 pro I have has a core sized proud centre section on the sink base, so contacts well using thermal paste.

You can of course remove the shim, some people will tell you it's easy, and it is, but there is a danger of killing the card, as some have done. I never recommend modifying anything permanently if there are other ways around it.

The danger den block does have a relief for the shim, but you may want to remove it anyway.

I believe ATI have pretty much sorted the shim issue, and usually good contact it made.

Not sure what you mean by "sorted"?

The 9800 I have has a core sized step in the centre of the sink to ensure contact with the core. This will have "sorted" the contact problem, but also renders the shim pretty pointless, and indicates to me that they, (ATI), still think it's a possible problem area or there would be no need for the raised core section on the sink base, (about 0.3mm). This also wont change the fact any flat bottomed block may not contact the core well, (or at all), if the shim is proud on some examples, due to mass production/ quality control factors.

So is it going to be a hassle for me to try and watercool my card? I was hoping I could just take my old heatsink off and put the waterblock on.

the swiftech one works fine..

.....so tempted to give a BillA type of response.......

Depends on you definition of hassle ;)

I don't buy commercial blocks any more so I can't comment on specifics of them personally, but JSimmons says the DD block it has a relief for the shim, (and to be honest any GPU / VPU that says it's for the 9700/9800 ought to have shim avoidance in the design as standard anyway). If so then it will be quite easy to do, (at least in theory). It only gets more complex if the water block doesn't have some form of shim avoidance, (flat base)

rOOt:

I am currently watercooling my 9700 and it works just fine. My core is running at 400Mhz (vmoded) and my RAM chips have NO heatsinks on them and running at 330Mhz. I eventually plan on adding fairly large heatsinks on the RAM to get hopefully around 350Mhz but they run just fine (even if they are scorching hot)

If you have a small case fan that is barely moving air in your case and have some BGA heatsinks on your RAM chips.... you should be just fine.

was wondering if anyone knows if there is any difference between the danger den geforce 4 and radeon water blocks aside from the clerance for the shim? I know my block for my geforce 4 has 2 sets of mounting holes, the ones I use for my card and another set really close to the block.

just wanted to know cause I want to upgrade my video card, i've been waiting for the geforce fx5900, but nvidia is taking way to long to get it out so i'm gona go with a 9800 pro it looks, but I don't want to buy another water block if I don't have to.