I wonder if that will fit my ATI All-in-Wonder 9600XT. That fan makes quite a racket, but clearance always seems to be a problem with replacement coolers.

Those are ok for cards with rather low power consumption but that is all they are good for. As for the 9600xt start searching for artic cooling vga silencer. http://www.tweakmonster.com/ramsinks/images/Arcticcooler.jpg

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/ArcticCool … mages/back2.jpg

In addition to being complete overkill for a 9600, the VGA Silencer has been out of production for quite awhile, so it's difficult to find one, and when they do come up for sale they tend to be priced for as much as the AIW 9600XT is worth. Plus not all revisions of it fit the AIW cards. (And the 'ATI Silencer' that replaced it definitely doesn't fit them.)

Those cheap 'flower' type coolers are more than sufficient for a 9600XT. They're even fine for 9700/9800 cards, and a lot of the modern mid-range cards too... I'd say pretty much any card that's low enough wattage to not require the auxiliary PCIe power connector. I've used a few of them myself, they're certainly not the greatest thing ever made, but they're hard to beat for $5 shipped, and they work better than a lot of the stock coolers on these older cards.

It may require bending or clipping a couple of the fins to get it to clear the tuner shield box on an AIW card, but it shouldn't be too difficult to make it work.

Yeah the 9600 is not a hot chip. They are often passively cooled with a fairly small heatsink. The Pro and XT often have those weak all-in-one heatsink/fan coolers primarily for cheapness and visual appeal I suppose.

The AIW 9600XT was a bit odd in that the fan wasn't actually on top of the CPU itself, but offset on the heatsink. Its seems that most AGP video cards from what I call the "era of crap hardware" had these cheesy little fans that broke and caused so many failures.

Yeah, I've seen that before. Fortunately, that means there's at least enough clearance for the replacement heatsink to extend as far up as wherever the fan sat, so it's only the corner of the tuner shield box you have to worry about.

It wasn't just video cards that had... I call 'em "angry bee fans". A lot of the upper-end motherboards of the time had them on the northbridge coolers too. That was especially fun on the Nforce4 boards, where the chipset heatsink was right under the edge of the PCIe video card, so there wasn't much room to replace the shitty little fan with something better.

NJRoadfan wrote:

The AIW 9600XT was a bit odd in that the fan wasn't actually on top of the CPU itself, but offset on the heatsink. Its seems that most AGP video cards from what I call the "era of crap hardware" had these cheesy little fans that broke and caused so many failures.

My MSI 6600GT AGP was like that too: http://www.pcstats.com/articleimages/200501/M … 600GT_front.jpg

The fan stopped working a few years ago... 😐