There was an item posted on “Hardmac” yesterday about the Radeon X1900 XT video card possibly being too hot for the Mac Pro.
Hardmac.com : Radeon X1900 XT: Too Hot for the Mac Pro?
One of our readers has brought a problem to our attention that affects some Mac Pros equipped with a Radeon X1900 XT. After couple of months of intensive 3D use, the cooling system installed on the Radeon X1900 XT loses efficiency, the card then overheats and the user sees video artifacts and even complete freezes of the system.
Hardmac also mentioned in their post a couple of temporary solutions including changing the orientation of one of the Mac Pro fans to changing the PCI stage fan speed. They suggested that a permanent fix might be a firmware update.
I recently upgraded my Mac Pro to the X1900 XT card and I replaced the heat sink and cooling fan assembly before even installing the card. i did this mainly to reduce the noise that the standard cooling fan generates but in the process I also gained some additional cooling capacity. The standard cooling unit is known as being very loud.
The new cooling unit I used was Thermaltake’s CL-G0076 VGA Cooler. This cooler is based off the Arctic Cooling silencer series with DHES so all the heat is blown out the back of the case. It also features a solid copper base with duel heat pipes, a larger fan and is much quieter then stock.
On some of these unit it’s been reported that the bottom of the copper heat sink is rough and should be polished before installing. I did not find this to be the case with my unit so maybe there have been some improvements in the recent production process. I did have to modify the fan power connector to fit the original onboard connector.
The card fits the same mounting points as the stock cooling unit and installation shouldn’t take more the 15-20 minutes. it comes with all the mounting hardware required.
Not only is this unit almost totally silent but it’s been reported to significantly lower the temperatures of the GPU and memory chips from what the stock unit was able to do.
Technorati Tags: mac+pro, x1900xt, radeon+x1900xt, thermaltake, vga cooler
Just curious if you could go into more detail about how you had to modify the power connector. I am wanting to get this same cooler, but have read some other posts that describe problems with getting it “powered.” It would be great if you could describe what you did to get it hooked up.
Thanks.
The final mod I made was to use the power connector off the OEM cooling fan. A little solder and some heat shrink tubing (used a hair dryer to shrink the tubing after finishing the soldering) and it looks like it came from the factory that way. I’ve had no problems and the card is cool and quiet.