x1900gt cooling

[xXsupern00bXx]

Wondering what the most cost efficent way to cool a x1900gt would be.
right now it is idleing at temps around 48c

[DMB2000uk]

You're not going to get much below that temperature, at maximum 10oC cooler with air cooling, but I would recommended the The Accelero X2 by artic cooling. I have one of the older ATI coolers by them and they are so quiet while being pretty good coolers.

Dan

[dgood]

or the zalman fataility or just the vf900 etc they are good coolers. I think idle you can expect with a good cooler something around 34 or 35 C with an air cooler if you have good airflow in your case. with my arctic cooler on my x800 i idle around 34.

[xXsupern00bXx]

thanks for the really fast reply and my idle has bumped up to 51C now, one of my fans recently.
how bad of an idea do you think it would be to run a game like rainbow six vegas for a few hours w/o getting a new cooling system? b/c when i used to run that game my card would jump into the high 60's and mid 70's.

[dgood]

first thing I'd do is take out the card and spray it with some canned air and take the cooler apart if you have to to get it really clean and just put on a new layer of thermal paste (arctic silver 5) on the gpu that makes the biggest difference. I had my x800 break 100C when I got it clogged with dust.

[xXsupern00bXx]

ok thanks that sounds like a good idea , didnt think to try that

One other question you wouldnt happen to know why my memory is only clocked at 597MHz when every site says the card has 1.2GHz memory clock speed.

[DMB2000uk]

Its basically fancy DDR memory (Double Data Rate) so it accesses it twice per clock so the 597 is effectively 1196 (which is 1.2G's in marketing terms.

Dan

[xXsupern00bXx]

Oh ok that makes sense thanks again for the speedy replies