I recently purchased a XFX Radeon 4770 video card which happened to be on sale. It seemed to perform pretty well, but the fan was way too loud. After some digging on the internet, I found a replacement fan that would do the job. (So much for me saving money on the sale price.)
I purchased an Arctic Cooling Accelero L2 Pro fan.
It comes with minimal packaging as you can see.
Here is what you get inside. There are 16 small video RAM heatsinks, small washers and spacers, a few screws (I got 3, when I should have gotten 4), and a power adapter.
The first step was to remove the existing fan and its housing from the video card. No problem, only 4 screws on the back of the card and a gentle twist releases it from the grip of the thermal paste.
The new fan is screwed on from the back of the card. When I first replaced the fan, the computer video refused to come on. The problem was found to be that the plastic spacers supplied were preventing the heatsink from properly contacting the graphics chip. The screws should go through the spacers on the back of the card and directly into the screw holes on the fan's mounting bracket. Once this was resolved, the card was very quiet. The card was on sale at NCIX.com for $90 and the fan was $20.
I mainly bought the new card to speed up Flight Simulator X which I have been getting back into. The card helps quite a bit, but FSX also relies heavily on the CPU which is a 3 ghz AMD. I'm not able to max out the graphics settings quite yet, but maybe by my next system upgrade.
No comments:
Post a Comment