Canuck805 wrote:

Ideally, I'd prefer passive cooling... but I'll hookup my Asaka fans to my fan controller and give that a test first.

The current heatsinks on the 5500 are ridiculously skimpy.

I prefer passive too but I don't like trying to pop off those glued-on heatsinks. I've popped a GPU or two off the board doing that over the years. Sometimes they will come off nicely with cold though. 😁

They are skimpy for sure. Back then they all seemed to come like this. I think that it's likely that it's cheaper to throw on a POS fan than add metal to the heatsink.

I assume that the manufacturer had to consider a PCI card right next to the AGP Slot. That card could kill air circulation pretty well completely. So you would need a more ambitious cooling solution than just a bit more metal. I have a GF6800, which is still one slot wide but conducts heat via heatpipe to the back side of the card. But that amount of processed copper will cost more than a "pos fan".

There are plenty of single-slot passive video cards today that have GPUs that put out significantly more heat than VSA-100.

Quality cooling designs were not a priority back in 2000, especially for the gamer market. I don't know how many of those ~40mm fans that I've had to replace, but those things die very frequently.

swaaye wrote:

Quality cooling designs were not a priority back in 2000, especially for the gamer market.

Now, to save the honor of 3dfx, the Voodoo3 3000 has a nice cooling design.

ux-3 wrote:

Now, to save the honor of 3dfx, the Voodoo3 3000 has a nice cooling design.

Yup I liked Voodoo3's cooling. No fans. The thing is they ran so hot that it became a "hot topic" on the web back then. The ASIC was designed for it, and the boards themselves have heat dissipation pads designed into them too, but they idled around 80C and you can burn yourself on them.

yeah, nowdays I just put a 40x40 fan on voodoo3's , those scythe ~4cfm ones... QUIET and makes LOTS of difference to the v3's heat...

update: just tried a GF4200ti on the machine, the crashfet began! too unstable, although I overdid it with gfx drivers on this test enviroment... bah
can't wait for the v5 to arrive

keropi wrote:

update: just tried a GF4200ti on the machine, the crashfet began! too unstable, although I overdid it with gfx drivers on this test enviroment... bah
can't wait for the v5 to arrive

What version of the nVidia drivers did you try? Was it 81.something? If so, try 45.something. (You'll find the older drivers in nVidia's archive section.)

yeah, 81 blah blah, used the same installed driver that worked fine on my GeForce2... it just asked for a reboot and worked fine after.. I was to bored to re-install, since I have decided to go the v5 way 😀

edit: re-installing the driver on-top removed the crash-fest 😜

update:

I also installed a 80x80 fan on the v5500 , it is better now... the back of the 2 gpu's is still very hot though, atleast the front of the card is cool... I won't bother more with it since like all voodoo stuff this is designed to run hot...

I am quite happy with the results as of now, the TUSL2-C mobo is very stable it seems, speed is nice and will upgrare to a 1.4ghz tualatin soon 😁

(yeah I know the internal PSU fan is on the wrong side, but if I put it correct then in will conflict with the cpu fan... this way it just sucks out the hot air from the upper part of the tower 😀 )