With the FrostyTech GF4TEC Active Heatsink installed on the MSI GF4
Ti4600 and the card plugged into an Epox 8K3A+ there isn't a whole lot of
room left for anything else - and we like it that way. :) This is not
supposed to be a "practical" videocard cooler, it is an
"extreme" attempt at below ambient cooling. The key is below
ambient and not below zero. The temperatures we saw when running the
MSI video card through benchmarks were well below ambient room
temperatures (about 25 degrees Celsius), but not low enough to pose any
real problems with condensation.
The small wire you can see off to the left is a
thermocouple used for temperature measurements. The
thermocouple is mounted to the side of the GeForce 4 GPU so it
can take an accurate reading of the copper plate temperature. With a
little neoprene gasketting and some more insulation I'm sure we could get
things even colder, but then condensation may become an issue. Water and
$500 videocards is not something we like to mix unless that water is
doing what we want it to!
So how cold were we able to get an overclocked GeForce
4 Ti4600 to run at? Running at stock speeds of 300MHz core / 660MHz memory
in idle the Frosty GF4TEC maintained a temperature of between 12-14
degrees Celsius. Ambient room temperature was 25 degrees though out the
tests. At that stock speed our test system was able to grab a score of
10,238 3DMarks no sweat (literally). |