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 TECH TIPS!
BUILDING A Voodoo2 CARD COOLING DEVICE

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NOTE: IF YOU TRY ANY OF THE METHODS BELOW, YOU DO SO AT YOUR OWN RISK. I DO NOT ASSUME ANY RESPONSIBILITY OR LIABILITY FOR ANY DAMAGE WHICH MAY RESULT.

Other Cooling Options

Before I start, there are a number of good options to cooling the interior of your case and cards therein that require less bending and cutting, so I should mention them:

  • TennMax has a custom designed Stealth V2 Cooler that is rated very highly in a few reviews. I will be evaluating this very soon. It is very slender and will fit between 2 cards in SLI mode.
  • Brett Jacob's has a page on mounting a $10 Radio Shack drum fan near the cards that works well.
  • 3Dfx Cool started it all with their Voodoo Cooling apparatus.
  • One reader commented that my cooling device was over-engineered. He had 2 Voodoo2's in SLI mode and just stuck a CPU fan across the tops of the cards with a few drop of superglue.
  • Ben Jobin did me one better with his inspired double-fan device.
  • Also, Ben did what I did once and mounted an extra fan on the case frame over the cards and cut out the cover to allow outside cool air to be blown in directly over the motherboard. He could have done this right over the Voodoo2 cards and skipped his double-fan gizmo. Watch those sharp edges! Ben's page covers some general cooling issues common to ATX systems. He's a fanatic on cooling, as I am, but...
  • Whatever you do, don't do this! Yikes! I had an Erector Set when I was younger too.

Do you Need to do this?

   I am not going to argue with those who say this is unnecessary. There is no way for me to judge that. However, I was surprised at the amount of heat thrown off the Voodoo2, a lot of it coming from the RAM chips. A "heat probe" (Oregon Scientific indoor/outdoor digital thermometer) showed temperatures as high as 128F around the RAM chip and my case temperature rose about 10F after the card was inserted. That was enough for me to get excited. The little device I cooked up dropped the maximum RAM temperature to about 111F with the case closed, and with a PC Power & Cooling Turbo Cool 300, the closed or open temperatures now hover around 79 to 82F idling and 85 to 88F in use - a big improvement over 128F, wouldn't you say?

Pieces-Parts

To build the fan you need:

1 backpane block-off bracket

1 ball bearing 486 CPU fan (about 2" on a side)

2 wire ties

1 small piece of double-sided foam mounting tape - forgot in original post

1 hammer

2 pair of pliers

1 file or power grinder (I used a Dremel tool)

Start to build your own fan arrow_next.gif (159 bytes)

 

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