This simple mod to add fan to NVidia GTS 8600, is how I set out to rein in this fanless GPU temperatures.
The NVidia GTS series are power efficient, low end or entry level cards. I had one such card from MSI, an 8600 GTS.
I can’t recall if it was the 256 MB or 512 MB memory version. It was cheap, that’s for sure. Idly, its temperature were on the OK side, it’s even possible to touch the heatsink. It can be uncomfortable to touch at load. Having a fan near brings the temperature down, but holding it while operating the computer is out of the question.
After testing several fans, I settled on the Vizo Voyager II HDD cooling fan (available here). It’s quiet, and has screw slots to secure it. There’s no mounting points on the GPU, though. The hard has a huge heatsink at the back, and a spread-out thin shroud covering the main chip. The shroud fortunately has lateral cutouts, which allowed me to thread screws through it.
Using the screws to ‘capture’ four motherboard standoffs, it was only a matter of lining up the cooler and securing it. It’s quiet, the power connector uses a molex, and its cable is long enough for tidy cable management. Read: tuck-excess-behind-the-card-tidy.
This mod to add a fan to an NVidia 8600 GTS from MSI has brought the temperatures a few degrees lower at idle. The load temperatures could be better if a fan could be mounted near the heatsink’s fins, but that would mean physical tampering which I rather avoid.
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