Considering V3s, it's not a sacrifice. You can still upgrade their heatsinks with something better.

raymangold wrote:

For a future tip, get compressed air and leak the fluid onto the heatsinks so it freezes them until you see frost developing.
This hardens the thermal glue substance and makes it brittle-- causing the majority of the glue to come off with the heatsink and not left on the chip.

I tried this at first with freeze spray (-49°C), but it didn't seem to do much, aside from freezing my fingers. Wedging a knife inbetween and soaking it in isopropanol seemed easier.

I'm sorry if I'm hijacking your thread, but do you guys think you'd be able to fit one of these heatsinks on a V5?

Evert wrote:

I'm sorry if I'm hijacking your thread, but do you guys think you'd be able to fit one of these heatsinks on a V5?

You could fit any heatsink on any card using thermal glue.

You can't claim this is ultimate without sticking dual Tulatins in a BP6!

Evert wrote:

I'm sorry if I'm hijacking your thread

Well you could have at least picked a sliiightly smaller picture...

Evert wrote:

but do you guys think you'd be able to fit one of these heatsinks on a V5?

I think I've seen Phil (philscomputerlab) use these, he might know more.
If it's any help, the mounting holes on V5 and V3 are 3mm diameter, arranged in a 40x40mm square, so the distance between the holes is sqrt(40^2*2) = ~56.57 mm. The chips are spaced 79mm apart (center to center).

calvin wrote:

You can't claim this is ultimate without sticking dual Tulatins in a BP6!

I've thought about this, but since I intend to swap CPUs on a regular basis (for speed-sensitive applications), I prefer the convenience of a single Slot CPU. Besides, the second CPU wouldn't do anything in DOS anyway.

@jwt27: Yeah, I was being a total dick with the image size, sorry about that, as you will see I fixed it. Also, thanks for providing the dimensions for the mounting holes, very useful when it comes to picking a cooler.

jwt27 wrote:

http://i.imgur.com/BZ3NSR4.jpg […]
Show full quote

This gives me an idea for my Voodoo 3 3000. I'll look through my parts bin (and cross my fingers ^^).

jwt27 wrote:

raymangold wrote:

For a future tip, get compressed air and leak the fluid onto the heatsinks so it freezes them until you see frost developing.
This hardens the thermal glue substance and makes it brittle-- causing the majority of the glue to come off with the heatsink and not left on the chip.

I tried this at first with freeze spray (-49°C), but it didn't seem to do much, aside from freezing my fingers. Wedging a knife inbetween and soaking it in isopropanol seemed easier.

Just get a nice tall high quality cannister, tip it upside down, drizzle the liquid on, let it sit for like 10 seconds-- and if you've got enough all over it, your knife barely needs to be wedged for it to pop off. Works every time:

A little history as to how this came about: so Gary Donnovan mentioned putting the cards in the freezer to weaken the thermal glue--and it does-- but I didn't want to freeze the whole card for obvious reasons. A guy at my old job would always take compressed air and drizzle the liquid at the back of my shirt while I was working... so then I got the idea of doing the same on the voodoo cards when I purchased my first 5500 at the time.

I tried just that, but it didn't seem to do anything at all. You nearly got all the glue off in one piece! Would the liquid in compressed "air" cans be colder than the freeze spray I tried this with, maybe?

edit: updated first post with new specs.

jwt27 wrote:

I tried just that, but it didn't seem to do anything at all. You nearly got all the glue off in one piece! Would the liquid in compressed "air" cans be colder than the freeze spray I tried this with, maybe?

edit: updated first post with new specs.

Correct, you need to use a good quality cannister of compressed air liquid: you'll hear hissing each time the liquid hits the heatsink. Once the heasink is frozen it pops off with almost zero force as the glue becomes brittle. If it doesn't, then it's not cold enough-- but sometimes if you torque it hard enough and it hasn't fully reached the proper temperature, the heatsink'll come off with only half of the glue. Better than having all of the glue left on I guess :p

Water will be deposited, so after you do this, don't power on the card right away, give the IC awhile to go back to room temperature and any stray liquid to evaporate.

As a side note, don't get the liquid on your fingers :p best to do this in a comfortable environment with steady patience.

Thanks for the advice raymangold! I will definitely try and remove the coolers from my Voodoo 5 using your method. I've been pondering a bit lately on what cooling to use and I was wondering if you two think that this cooler can fit on a V5. I've read about people using Deepcool V50 VGA coolers on their Voodoo 5s and apparently that works well too.

Evert wrote:

Thanks for the advice raymangold! I will definitely try and remove the coolers from my Voodoo 5 using your method. I've been pondering a bit lately on what cooling to use and I was wondering if you two think that this cooler can fit on a V5. I've read about people using Deepcool V50 VGA coolers on their Voodoo 5s and apparently that works well too.

The best replacement coolers for the 5500s are the pure copper Vantec IceBerq CCB-A1C fans:

I don't have a photo of any on hand, but here's someone else's photo of what they look like:

Strangely ebay seems to be devoid of them now... there used to be quite a handful for like 10$ a pack. The nice thing is that they each come with extra heatsinks with (genuine) 3M thermal tape and a hefty tube of standard-- but decent -- thermal paste. They keep the 5500s fairly cool, WAY better than the original cooling system which is hugely inadequate.

I've tried to look for a couple of them myself, but it's almost impossible to find them. The V50 from Deepcool is kind of like an alluminium knockoff of the Vantec:

So, do you have any updates on the build?

Not really... Still have to reinstall dos and all other software. Haven't made much progress with that, and it's grinded to a halt since GTA5 came along.

Off Topic: I'm more of a Saints Row 4 type of guy. I did enjoy GTA Vice City though.

Hope you keep us posted, I'm particularly interested in the long term performance of your cooling mods.

ODwilly wrote:

I bet those North Bridge heatsinks were for those crazy 775 Nvidia chipsets that got super hot. Like the 680i

jwt27 wrote:

Could be, I've never seen those in action before, and I can't find any TDP specs on them. Can hardly believe these took much more than 20-30W though...

x48 and x38 chipsets ran pretty hot when over clocking iirc

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?It … N82E16813131232 ok looks like my board is a 750i chipset. The chipset has a 40mm fan and still gets hot to the touch!

Quick update, I replaced the fan on the Voodoo5 yesterday with a 800rpm one. Not that 500rpm wasn't sufficient but I thought placing the 500rpm one on the cpu would make more sense.
While doing so, I noticed that the fan lifts one of the heatsinks up a bit if it's not mounted 100% straight on. So while I was at it, I removed the push pins from the V3 heatsinks and replaced these with screws. And while I had the heatsinks off, I thought I might as well replace the caps too 😀

I had some of these laying around. (actually bought them for something else)

They're slightly larger than the stock caps and with entirely different specs. 120µF/6.3V vs 10µF/16V. I kinda assumed all electrolytics are directly on the power rails, so I think "bigger is better" would apply here. Did run into some practical difficulties trying to solder them, but got them all in place eventually:

Quick cleanup:

I've glued the screws to the heatsink now for easy installation:

On the back side, I placed a thick rubber washer on each screw:

And on top of that, these huge "threaded washer" things to hold everything together:

End result:

So now, this is what I have so far. Yeah it's a mess. Still don't have a suitable case for it.