It seems I will be forever cursed with noisy fan syndrome!
First, there was the chipset fan. Why oh why do some motherboard manufacturers still insist on using active cooling on chipsets where it is not needed? I have no idea.
They don’t last very long and will need to be replaced unless you enjoy being tormented. I replaced the small Gigabyte chipset fan on my motherboard with a Zalman ZM-NB32K, as I’ve detailed here.
All was right in the world for a few months, but then suddenly, I turn on my PC and there is a bizarre noise coming from my graphics card. Yet another small shitty fan had packed it in. I was annoyed because now that I have a PS3, I wanted to avoid spending any more money on my PC (excl. storage) for at least 12 months.
Many painful hours of searching and review reading resulted in me settling with a Zalman VF700-Cu. All the reviews I read gave it an extremely good rating and even the store I buy from had customers praising it. After checking it would work on my GeForce 6600 GT AGP, I ordered it and it was here the next business day.
As was the case when I replaced the default chipset heatsink, it was a slightly destructive process. I ended up snipping the plastic pins that held the stock heatsink on the graphics card. I cleaned off the left over thermal grease with a cotton bud and some methylated spirits, which worked perfectly, then applied the Zalman thermal grease included with the VF700.
The mounting apparatus looks quite complex at first, but if you read the instructions carefully you’ll find it’s actually very simple. To sum it up briefly – you attach the brace to the bottom of the card (faces up when installed), then screw a double sided nut onto each end of the brace before finally attaching the heatsink to those.
I did not even attempt to use any of the eight included RAM heatsinks, as I read they can interfere with the main heatsink on AGP cards. Also, the heatsink overhangs by 30mm on AGP cards due to the presence of the HSI chip. These were non-issues for me because the RAM wasn’t cooled in the first place and my case is very wide.
In terms of the additional cooling it provided I was blown away. After a thorough clean of the stock heatsink it used to idle at 59°C, with the VF700-Cu installed it now idles at 42°C. That’s an absolutely huge difference.
Huzzah! All problems solved then…!?
Nope.
A few days ago, I noticed the fan on my CPU cooler was starting to get abnormally noisy when it span faster on warmer days. It’ll be the next to go and soon I would imagine. I will probably look in the Zalman direction again, if I buy a new CPU cooler.
