After a few weeks of spare time in the work room Frosty's GF4TEC Active Heatsink
has been finished, and tested on a live MSI GF4 Ti4600. We'll get to the
temperature and overclocking results in just a second, but first lets look at what
went into making our custom thermoelectric cooled heatsink.
The FrostyTech GF4TEC Active Heatsink employs a few ideas which
have been rolling around in the back of my mind for some time now. After
reviewing so many different makes and models of heatsinks for processors there
are are a few things that begin to stand out.
The first and foremost is a technique we've devised called Angled Fan
Orientation. We first applied Angled Fan Orientation about two
years ago to improve the cooling performance of pin-based heatsink we were
testing at the time. It can be used on just about any type of heatsink given the
right prerequisites are there however. As the name suggests, Angled Fan
Orientation (AFO for short) essentially means angling the fan to the heatsink so
that the exhaust air hits it in a certain way. I won't go into the specifics in
this article, but basically what you will see in the following images is an
adaptation of that technique. We did some tests a long time ago of AFO vs.
standard impingement fan orientations and the difference could be as
much as 6 degrees Celsius.
In any case, the FrostyTech GF4TEC is built from an Alpha P125 heatsink, a
thermoelectric cooler (from the venerable Swiftech MC1000), a 38mm thick
high-speed 7000RPM Delta fan and a copper base plate. On there own these parts
were taking up storage room in the FrostyTech Labs, but together they will be
combined to be one hell of a nVidia GeForce 4 Ti4600 GPU active cooler. This
heatsink is going to do more than cool off the GeForce 4 GPU, it is going
to cool it below ambient
temperatures! All this in the name of cooling, we must be crazy :)
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