They used anodized aluminum on FlowFX eh? Yuck. Not uncommon to see though. It fools a lot of people. It's probably entirely sufficient too but that airflow is just pathetic.

Yeah the VF700 and similar coolers do outperform these old blowers pretty handily. I have seen the same on other high end GPUs of the time. It makes me think the blowers were there mostly to look and sound hardcore. It sells.

I'm using a Chinese clone of that cooler on a 5950 Ultra and it works great 😀

Those VF700 are very good. I had one on my 8800GT which reduced the temperatures.

I've always been interested those 5800 Ultras
Just recently I replaced the stock Asus cooler on my GeForce FX 5950 Ultra with a NV4 Rev2 and like you saw over ~20-30c reduction in temps!

foey wrote:

Just recently I replaced the stock Asus cooler on my GeForce FX 5950 Ultra with a NV4 Rev2 and like you saw over ~20-30c reduction in temps!

Same here! Been a fan and avid user of Arctic Cooling GPU/CPU heatsinks for years. Best bang for the buck ratio, even more so if you enjoy silent computing...

I ran a couple of Silencers. One on a Radeon 9700 and one on a X850. The problem was the fans wear out. There is a sleeve bearing (they call it ceramic) and it gets worn and becomes noisy. It takes quite some hours but I had it happen several times. I got free replacements from China once. Arctic Cooling had a neat eBay store with parts once too...

I have several Accelero S1/S2 coolers. Can't go wrong with those passive radiators. S1 can handle a Radeon 4850. I put one on a 2900 XT too but you should definitely add a fan in that case. The fan only needs to add a small amount of airflow so it can still be silent.

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seems almost criminal to replace the Flow FX with anything else, it's what made the 5800 Ultra a 5800 Ultra 🤣.

candle_86 wrote:

seems almost criminal to replace the Flow FX with anything else, it's what made the 5800 Ultra a 5800 Ultra 🤣.

I actually expected you to say something like this. 🤣

Honestly there was a degree of "this is sacrilege" while dismantling Flow FX from the card, but on the other hand the end result is slightly faster, slightly cooler, and slightly quieter than FX 5900XT. There's no more compromising "this card is slightly faster but runs hotter and louder." It's just a much nicer card to live with overall. And honestly, I'd like to believe that one of FX 5800's original design goals was not "be loud and run hot." 🤣

obobskivich wrote:

I'm almost wondering if you aren't onto something with the blower too. There's a number of older cards like this that have blowers which make the card loud and bulky, and which are outperformed by more traditional-style coolers like VF700 (and I say more traditional because, in concept, VF700 isn't that far away from the fansink-style coolers that GeForce 2/3 and some 3dfx card have - its just a heatsink with a fan right on top of it). I mean, honestly I would imagine that if 5800 Ultra had been released with the VF700 (or something similar), and performed like my card now does, history would remember it much differently - certainly it would not have been "Dustbuster FX". And I find it hard to imagine that nVidia could not come up with anything more elegant than Flow FX. However, if they actively wanted a cooler that was big and loud then it absolutely accomplished its goal. 😵

I just remembered that there's some precedent to this blower nonsense. There was an Abit GPU cooler branding named "OTES" starting with GeForce4. They were not entirely dissimilar to FlowFX. They were very loud.
http://techreport.com/review/4274/abit-siluro … s-graphics-card

I thought that the "otes" marketing name was a huge blunder. I remember this image coming to my mind every time I heard about their new cooling system:

I hope you kept the old coolers around so you can get the cards back to stock someday. So many of those 5800 ultras baked themselves to death back in the day.

swaaye wrote:

I just remembered that there's some precedent to this blower nonsense. There was an Abit GPU cooler branding named "OTES" starting with GeForce4. They were not entirely dissimilar to FlowFX. They were very loud.

Yes, OTES - there's actually an OTES 5800 (it isn't an Ultra). I've read all sorts of rumors about an Abit<->nVidia connection for Flow FX as well.

Abit 5800:

It probably works better than Flow FX too, since it has a much larger heatsink area, doesn't appear to have the RAM sharing the contact plate with the GPU, and isn't trying to pull the airflow thru a u-bend. 😊

Unknown_K wrote:

I hope you kept the old coolers around so you can get the cards back to stock someday. So many of those 5800 ultras baked themselves to death back in the day.

Yes, I have a bin for old heatsinks - it rarely ever gets sorted or emptied, and there's probably many heatsinks, coolers, etc in there for cards/boards/etc I no longer have too. 🤣

I don't see myself swapping the Flow FX back onto the 5800 though - there's no improvement to be had. 😊

Send me the Flow FX then, I shall put it in a glass case and mount it on a wall, I'm not kidding