Earlier this week I decided to remove my G400 to try some new cooling ideas with the chip and memory, when I popped the heatsink off the G400 (Tennmax Lasagna), I noticed the heatsink compound wasn't making contact in the middle of the chip!(I always use as little compound as possible)
So using a tooling guide, I checked out the heatsink and found it to be perfectly flat, so on to the g400...
What I found was that the G400 chip had slightly raised edges on all four sides!
With some 600 grit sandpaper, I carefully sanded off the edges (used a permanent marker on the edges as a guide) bringing the surface to a much flatter and smoother finish(I then repeated this on my memory chips as they have heatsinks on them as well)
I was only able to get 3 more mhz out of the core and memory, I feel confident that the chips are running much cooler now than they were before which should extend the lifespan of the card
(note the speeds I reached were 3 higher than in my sig but I run at the sig speeds as there's not a large difference in performance just cooler chips)
jim
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Abit BE6 with P3 500 @ 5*124=620
14.6 gb Maxtor ata66 and 128mb ram
G400 vanilla 32mb @ 168/210
Sblive with Altec Lansing speaker combo
384k DSL and Realtek nic
Windows 98se with DX7a
3dMark2000 = 2956
Worn out reset button :O)
So using a tooling guide, I checked out the heatsink and found it to be perfectly flat, so on to the g400...
What I found was that the G400 chip had slightly raised edges on all four sides!
With some 600 grit sandpaper, I carefully sanded off the edges (used a permanent marker on the edges as a guide) bringing the surface to a much flatter and smoother finish(I then repeated this on my memory chips as they have heatsinks on them as well)
I was only able to get 3 more mhz out of the core and memory, I feel confident that the chips are running much cooler now than they were before which should extend the lifespan of the card
(note the speeds I reached were 3 higher than in my sig but I run at the sig speeds as there's not a large difference in performance just cooler chips)
jim
------------------
Abit BE6 with P3 500 @ 5*124=620
14.6 gb Maxtor ata66 and 128mb ram
G400 vanilla 32mb @ 168/210
Sblive with Altec Lansing speaker combo
384k DSL and Realtek nic
Windows 98se with DX7a
3dMark2000 = 2956
Worn out reset button :O)
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