Video Cooling

It seems I may have fried yet another video card no thanks to the extreme heat in my computer casing. The card started producing the typical overheated video ram/GPU artifacts, like weird flickering artifacts obscuring the entire game display, sudden freezes and the like.

The card was sent for servicing under the warranty coverage, and I managed to persuade the supplier to get me a loaner unit. Unfortunately, despite the loaner being a lower end card, it started developing heat issues. I decided to go open casing.

The drawback of open casing setups is that first the case is highly exposed and very vulnerable to liquid spills, bugs entering, etc. More importantly, the open casings have less efficient air flows if not actively cooled and in the same confined area as my current comp.

My solution was to have one of the small but extremely powerful sound system cooling fans and fit it in such a way that it directly feeds cooler air to the vid card. It's the heavy variety of 120mm fan that has incredible output, with a metal frame and blades. Relatively quiet, to boot.

However, as it was feeding in the air from the side of the casing near the rear end, it was in danger of recycling the warmer air from the exhaust vents at the rear of the casing. To minimize air recycling, I installed a cardboard baffle at the exhaust to direct the hot air away from the new fan's intake.

First tests before the fan's installation indicated that CPU temps were around mid 50 degs C on load, and the casing temp was around 50 degs as well. The top of the casing itself felt warm, which indicated a hot air buildup. Not acceptable at all. Obviously, the heatsink on the CPU is blasting it with hot air. My loaner card did not have an electronic temp monitor, but it stands to reason that 50 deg air was bad for it.

After powering up the new fan, casing temps quickly dropped to 34 degs, which is a few degs warmer than the ambient. However, the top of the casing still felt warm on load, suggesting heat issues. Moreover, the CPU temp was largely unchanged, indicating that the fan's cool air was not hitting it at all. The CPU was located somewhere above the vid card.

My solution was then to elevate the fan using a brick, so that it spewed the cool air towards the CPU as well. This greatly improved the air flow over the vid card and hit the CPU as a bonus. This time, not only did the CPU and casing temps drop, the top of the casing did not feel warm anymore. A test of a video game demonstrated that the graphics card glitches were now completely absent.

I expect that the heat issues should be gone with my graphics card when it comes back from servicing. However, only a test of the system on load will be able to definitively prove that.