Fanless Video Card Dilemma/Cooling Issues

Mugenmidget

Hey there, I'll try to outline my experience as succinctly as I can before hopping to my questions.

I had some issues with my PC outlined in another thread where it was eventually discovered that capacitors on my video card had visibly blown. I would assume this was a heating issue, but regardless I wanted to make sure I got a replacement so I sent it back to the manufacturer and now have a replacement card.

They were great about sending a replacement, and now I have this card (which is practically the same as my old one except with increased video RAM):

http://www.buy.com/prod/EVGA-GeForce-6200-AGP-512-MB-DDR2-64-bit-300MHz-DirectX-9-0-Video-Card/q/loc/101/210678865.html

The problem is that this card still lacks a fan, like my old one it's only sporting a heatsink. In my limited experience with video cards, this almost always leads to a heating problem because I never see fit to add extra cooling or ventilation in my PC cases besides what comes "stock".

I've seen a Radeon sizzle out in a puff of smoke and my a relative's computer suffer from freezing because their fanless card (nVidia FX 5200) keeps heating up (I tried underclocking it but it didn't seem to help much). So I would hope I've learned my lesson by now, but I'd like to check in with you guys on the following:

-Are there easy and cost efficient methods to adding cooling to a PC that would prevent this or would a fan need to be directly mounted on the card in question?

-Can a fan be mounted right on top of the heatsink (or anywhere else on this particular card)?

-Am I wrong to assume the capacitors exploded because of heating? I don't have much basis for this and I'm obviously kinda clueless when it comes to these things.

I'm currently using a left over FX 5200 with a fan directly mounted on the board. The 6200 would give me a slight performance boost but as my choice of video cards has revealed I'm dealing with a relatively low spec PC (1.5 GHz Duron, 640 MB of RAM) so I don't think I need it for the time being. It does have an S-Video TV out so maybe it could be used in a demented SD HTPC/gaming project box for the living room.

So more to the point: what are good cooling solutions related specifically to video cards? And can blown capacitors be related to heating issues?

If you need clarification on anything I've left vague or muddled then I'll try my best to explain. Thank you for any and all input, I'm sorry for jumping all over the place.

exoplasm

I don't know much about exploding capacitors except that they generally only occur when assembled in a sub-par manner.

As for fanless heatsinks I've never seen a card sporting one of those that is even capable of getting hot enough to need more than that. Generally if a card lacks a fan it's pretty weak. Your overall case temp could be high, though. Use Speedfan or Realtemp or Coretemp to check it out. There's also Rivatuner (I think) for the GPU temp.

I would recommend using 120mm fans in your case creating a front to back airflow. Although I suppose 80mm fans would work fine as well, but they are noisier.

If the video card is really getting hot you can get a new heatsink that wraps both sides of it, fan optional. Would be overkill for that particular model, though.

Mugenmidget

Hm, well it's interesting you bring that up, because the card never froze or showed any of the "normal" signs for overheating (like what I've seen in other PCs at least).

But if I stuck the card in there and it has another mishap, is that doing any damage to the rest of my PC? I don't mind it dying too much since the warranty is renewed with this replacement, so the only thing I really have to lose would be the rest of my PC (which again is a cheapo rig so that wouldn't be the biggest loss).

I'll still look into cooling, it just generally sounds like a good thing to get comfortable with so my future PCs don't suffer.

On that note, something weird is going on with the temperature sensing of this PC. I took a screenshot to demonstrate it, hopefully:



The CPU is fluctuating wildly on its temperature, sometimes there isn't even a reading. Why would that be happening?

exoplasm

I've never had temp monitors work 100% for me. It could be a slightly unsupported motherboard/chipset/cpu or the software could be reading it wrong or whatever. You can get different results from different programs.

Unless it's under load your CPU shouldn't vary (especially not that much), but you could always pull the heatsink off and see if any of the thermal stuff is still there. Uh, you should probably make sure you have some on hand just in case there isn't enough, cause otherwise you'd just worsen the situation.