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blink
eye of horus



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NEW AGE COPPER HEATSINKS!!!! OMGLOLLERKITTY!!!111~
#5511917 - 04/13/06 11:00 AM (17 years, 9 months ago) |
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All hardware geeks know its your videocard that is the main bottleneck in 3d game performance. They also know that in the case of Geforce 2+ cards its the speed of the ram on the card thats the bottleneck, not the core speed. In other words, overclock the core and youre wasting your time, but overclock the memory and you will get a few more fps. To assist in overclocking the video ram many places sell little heatsinks that you stick onto the ram to help cool things down. But a set of 8 of them costs anywhere from 30-50$! 30 bucks for some little lumps of copper that will only help you get 5 more mhz out of your ram? What the hell is with that?
Afrotech is here to save the day, the groovy hairstyle way.
Whats the cheapest and most widely available source of copper? Copper pennies of course! Apparently its the pennies made before 1982 that are 95% copper. The ones made after 1982 are like only 5% copper. So look around in your piggy bank for at least 40 really old pennies.
Once you've got them, clean them. I am a cheap guy and only used soap and water and the acidic properties of disgustingly warm coke to help clean them a bit. Some of them were still pretty dirty and oxidised though. Anyways, what people who are less lazy than me SHOULD do is drop the coins in a cupful of vinegar, and add a lot of salt and baking soda and stirr it around and stuff. I haven't done this since I was a kid but it used to de-oxidise copper better than anything I know of. Also, you should probably get a dremel or some other sort of power sanding device and sand off the designs of the pennies so that you are left with a bunch of smooth copper discs. Again, I was too lazy for that @;).
Here's a shot of my pennies drying off.

To make a ramsink, take a penny, smear thermal crap all over it, and use a tiny drop of superglue to stick it onto another penny. Then keep doing it. Rather than create a solid column of pennies, its probably better to stagger the arrangement of pennies so you increase the exposed surface area - duplicating the fins on a normal heatsink. I made my ramsinks 5 pennies high.
 
Then I used more thermal crud and more drops of superglue to stick the ramsinks onto my Gf2.
 
After sticking the card back into the machine, I was able to get the ram stable up to 380mhz (stock speed is 333mhz). 390mhz when I opened a window and let my really hot room cool down a bit. Is that an improvement? I don't know because I was too damn lazy to do 'before' tests! Anyways looking around the net it seems that 390mhz is a pretty decent Gf2 ram speed to reach, so for sure the project didn't make things any worse.

Total cost of the project: 40 cents, + 1/3rd tube of thermal paste + 1/5th tube of superglue = Ghetto ramsink cooled video card for LESS THAN ONE DOLLAR. To hell with those 40$ fancy shiny blue ramsink kits I say! Btw my Gf2 weighs about 1 kilo now lol.
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Konnrade
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Re: NEW AGE COPPER HEATSINKS!!!! OMGLOLLERKITTY!!!111~ [Re: blink]
#5512000 - 04/13/06 11:30 AM (17 years, 9 months ago) |
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Ghetto overclocking, now I've seen everything 
I bet I'm probably going to wind up trying that... I can't afford to replace my Radeon 9700 Pro, but I want to eek some more performance out of it.
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blink
eye of horus



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Re: NEW AGE COPPER HEATSINKS!!!! OMGLOLLERKITTY!!!111~ *DELETED* [Re: Konnrade]
#5512003 - 04/13/06 11:31 AM (17 years, 9 months ago) |
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Post deleted by blinkidiotReason for deletion: Im sorry
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Konnrade
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Registered: 09/13/05
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Re: NEW AGE COPPER HEATSINKS!!!! OMGLOLLERKITTY!!!111~ [Re: blink]
#5512012 - 04/13/06 11:33 AM (17 years, 9 months ago) |
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Metal binder? I'm not familiar with that.
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I find your lack of faith disturbing
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blink
eye of horus



Registered: 03/31/02
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Re: NEW AGE COPPER HEATSINKS!!!! OMGLOLLERKITTY!!!111~ *DELETED* [Re: Konnrade]
#5512036 - 04/13/06 11:47 AM (17 years, 9 months ago) |
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Post deleted by blinkidiotReason for deletion: Im sorry
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Konnrade
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Re: NEW AGE COPPER HEATSINKS!!!! OMGLOLLERKITTY!!!111~ [Re: blink]
#5512108 - 04/13/06 12:09 PM (17 years, 9 months ago) |
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hrm... will do. Thanks.
This is actually giving me some neat ideas. I'll probably wind up experimenting to see which layout of pennies offers the best surface area while still preserving a good, solid portion of copper that connects directly to the heat source, to conduct the heat efficiently outward to the extremeties.
I'll probably just wind up soldering them, though. It's not like I don't have a soldering iron laying around
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I find your lack of faith disturbing
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blink
eye of horus



Registered: 03/31/02
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Re: NEW AGE COPPER HEATSINKS!!!! OMGLOLLERKITTY!!!111~ [Re: Konnrade]
#5512218 - 04/13/06 12:36 PM (17 years, 9 months ago) |
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be careful with the soldering... remember you're putting the pennies on there to draw away the heat, not solderiron the RAM till it goes kaput!
also; remember to use flux
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barfightlard
tales of theinexpressible



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Re: NEW AGE COPPER HEATSINKS!!!! OMGLOLLERKITTY!!!111~ [Re: blink]
#5512409 - 04/13/06 01:46 PM (17 years, 9 months ago) |
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hahaha awesome
ghetto mods rule
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"What business is it of yours what I do, read, buy, see, say, think, who I fuck, what I take into my body - as long as I do not harm another human being on this planet?" - Bill Hicks
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Konnrade
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Re: NEW AGE COPPER HEATSINKS!!!! OMGLOLLERKITTY!!!111~ [Re: blink]
#5512543 - 04/13/06 02:33 PM (17 years, 9 months ago) |
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I'd probably just use a weak glue to adhere the pennies to the actual ram. I know better than to try to solder something directly onto a chip 
Also, I forgot to comment on the liberal use of thermal gel in the article: it's a bad idea.
Thermal gel is supposed to be used VERY sparingly. If there's a full layer of it between the peices of metal, then it's going to get in the way of heat transfer. The point of the thermal gel is just to fill up imperfections and small gaps to bring the metal into contact where it ordinarily wouldn't be. In places where the metal allready contacts, there should be no layer of thermal gel to get in the way.
It would probably be best to just use an abrasive to grind the pennies flat beforehand. At least flatten the places where they are stuck together, and then use a very tiny amount of thermal gel to fill in the gaps on their surface.
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OJK
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Registered: 06/08/03
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Re: NEW AGE COPPER HEATSINKS!!!! OMGLOLLERKITTY!!!111~ [Re: blink]
#5512592 - 04/13/06 02:55 PM (17 years, 9 months ago) |
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awesome site, thanks man
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Konnrade
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Re: NEW AGE COPPER HEATSINKS!!!! OMGLOLLERKITTY!!!111~ [Re: blink]
#5513738 - 04/13/06 08:57 PM (17 years, 9 months ago) |
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I was too lazy to solder 
I bought some JB Weld and tossed together part of 4 different heatsinks made of pennies. Mine are 2-wide though. A little too wide for the actual chips, but at least they have a good amount of surface area exposed to the air, so they should be able to dissipate a good amount of heat.
I even used all pre-1985 pennies 
That was actually pretty fun... I should have bought the JB-Quik though... I don't want to wait 15 hours for the JB-Weld to cure 
by the way, are you sure that the JB-weld conducts heat well? It doesn't say anything about thermal conductivity, but I'd think an epoxy wouldn't be an ideal heat conductor.
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I find your lack of faith disturbing
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