Evercool Nighthawk VC-F117 - The Old Heatsink

For this particular project I picked my old video card that I have been using just over a year now. It is a Chaintek Ti4200 AGP8x.

The reason I picked it is because a while back, when I was pushing all the juice out of it, I fitted it with a self-rigged Pentium4 socket 478 heatsink. That replaced the original POS one that was sitting atop the GPU when I bought it. The project took me a little while at the time, but it was a success. After molesting the poor aluminum for a few hours and trying to find long screws to fit, it hasn't left the card until now.

I preferred not to mess with it having doubts that anything else could really top its performance. After all, a P4 heatsink is fitted with a fan spinning at 3400 RPM with a whopping noise rating of up to 41 dBA.

The F117 claims to have the speed of up to 3600 RPM but only with 18CFM, which isn’t all that much for a good fan. But the stealth-like noise rating of less than 20dBA sounded really sweet. Given the fact that the card is older I was interested in how this new unit was going to stand against the monster I had sitting in there before.

Here are a few pictures of the card that will undergo surgery.

Notice that the memory had heatsinks on the chips as well, but they were slanted a bit because of the humongous size of the heatsink itself.

And here is the picture of all three heatsinks this card has ever seen : Original Chaintek (what a joke), P4 478 and the new Evercool one.

So can Evercool Beat the old P4 piece? Lets change it and find out. I did record the temperatures before changing it, so not to worry, the comparison will be clear.

Next: Out With the Old and In With the New >>
 

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