Cooling the ATI Radeon 7500

Disclaimer: This page is for reference information only. I am not responsible for any damage you

cause to yourself or your computer.

Note: Preliminary Test Release of this mod

Installing the ATI Radeon 7500 into the cube made a significant improvement in video performance over

the stock ATI Rage Pro. Not only did it improve video all around, it allows the cube to drive two displays

at one time, and with Mac OS X Jaguar(10.2) enables Quartz Extreme. With this increase in performance

comes additional heat, lots of it. Because the 7500 was pulled from a tower, it has just a small size heatsink

installed, in fact, the heatsink on the 7500 is actually the same size as the stock Rage Pro. That, combined

with the compactness of the cube makes getting rid of the additional heat essential. So, how do we get

rid of this additonal heat? Install a cooling fan of coarse :)

I cannot take credit for this idea, I originally saw it here, but this page only showed the completed

install and not how to do it or exactly what parts are involved. So without further rambling, here's the

installation of a cooling fan onto the ATI Radeon 7500:

Here's the cooling fan that I used, its 35mm x 7mm

I got it from Digikey.com

Part number: 259-1092-ND

I got this small two pin connector from an old R/C car power pack.

Solder one end of the connector to the fan, don't forget to put the shrink tubing on first.

Here's the completed connector with shrink tubing.

I originally tried the fan without an inline resistor to reduce the voltage and thus slow it down and

make it quiter. But it was definitely too LOUD (about as loud as a TiBook fan on high speed,

those of you who own a TiBook know how annoying the fan can be at high speed) at 5v so I

soldered in a 47ohm resister to slow it down a bit, with the resistor the noise emitted is not above

my 80mm base fan(which has also been slowed down) or my hard drive.

All shrink wrapped ready to go, for those of you who would just like to reduce the fan speed

right away you can actually just install it while you're installing the 2 pin connector.

Using a piece of aluminum, cut out a 45mm * 18mm rectangle for use as a shim

I got the aluminum from Home Depot here's a part of the label, sorry the whole label isn't there used

it for another project. For those of you that have checked out my 7500 install you'll recognize the

piece of aluminum.

Here's how the aluminum shim and fan get attached to the video card, using Artic Alumina

thermal adhesive.

Here's a mock up to make sure everything is a go.

Mix the adhesive 1:1 ratio and apply a small amount to the aluminum shim.

This stuff really smells, so use it in a well ventilated area.

After it dries(few hours), attach the shim/fan to the memory chips with adhesive. Be careful

on the amount of adhesive used, only a little is necessary, you don't want it to ooze out

onto the memory chip connections, although it is non conductive.

Here's a top view of the cube, you can see here the 7mm height of the fan plus the ~2mm from the

shim make it just the right height to clear the chassis.

Here's another view from the side

And one more

The power wire will be routed around the side of the cube where it will make connection

with it's other half. At this point you're probably wondering where the other half of the

fan connector comes from...see the next picture.

You may have to reference the 80mm base fan install to help clarify the picture above.

Basically the fan the going to draw 5v from the optical drive using a splitter.

Here's the completed project

Here's what it looks like with the cube back in the enclosure.

For the adventureous individuals out there, you can also power the fan off the video card itself by soldering

the leads to a powerpoint of the card. I actually got the nerve up and did it.

The resistor was changed because this power point only puts only 3.3v, so I placed a 10 ohm

resistor inline instead of the 47 ohm from before.

So, what are the results after all this labor? Well ,using a instant read cooking thermometer

my cube runs at about 90 F in the core doing my normal tasks of surfing and checking email,

maybe some iTunes. Measuring the air coming up at the video card vent area reveals 100 F.

The great thing about the Sunon blower style fan that I used is that the discharged air is

blown up and right out the the video card vent. It doesn't just blow against the side of the

cube and increase the core temperature. And it does this all without being noisey.

When playing Quake 3 for about 30min the core temperature reaches about 100 F and the

video card discharge air is ~110 F. So it appears the video card runs approximately 10

degrees hotter than the core. So the cooling fan mounted of the video card is pumping out

10 degrees hotter air out the the cube's video card area. Without this fan the cube would

quickly soak up heat there. As stated above this page is still in progress. I hope to have more

pictures and temperature readings soon. I recently bought and installed an nVidia GeForce 3

and have been running it for the past two days. This card runs HOT, I've measure ~122 F

with this card just doing my normal surfing and e-mail, I can't imagine how much hotter it

would get playing Quake. Not to mention the cooling fan is quite noisey to me. When time

permits I will be testing and documenting the ATI Rage Pro, ATI 7500 with and without fan,

and the nVidia GeForce 3 in my cube for heat produced so they came be compared. Until then......