NVIDIA Quadro FX 1000 cooling

The fan cooling the NVIDIA Quadro FX 1000 in a Dell Precision 450 workstation failed. This card was a Dell Part# W0663 nVidia Quadro FX1000 128Mb 8x AGP. It was possible to replace the fan with the Artic Cooling NV Silencer 6 (revision 2); although there is a ~1cm gap between the plastic of the exhaust and the exit grill. This gap could be closed by the NV Silencer 1 (revision 2) - which appears to be the correct version of the product to use. However, the local store did not have one.

The excellent drawings from Artic Cooling of their devices - show the height clearances and physical layout very well. One specification which is left out is the actual position of the mounting pins (labled mounting holes in the drawing) which stick down from the cooler. When trying to decide which of their coolers might fit the Quadro FX 1000 it would have been helpful to know this. Note that this is clearly labeled in the case of the drawings for the NV Silencer 1 (revision 2) - which is listed as being appropriate for the Quadro FX 1000. Unfortunately the local shop where I could obtain parts did not have an NV Silencer 1 (revision 2) in stock, but only had a NV Silencer 1 (without any version number indicated). This particular device has 4 mounting screws in a square, rather than two on a diagonal as in the case of the FX 1000 fan which I was removing. It appears that the board had holes for both types of mountings, but since it used the two holes on a diagonal for the current fan and there were nice clearance marks on the board for the small rubber spacers which are placed on the screw posts after they come out the back of the board, I chose to use the NV Silencer 6 (revision 2) board.

I would like to acknowledge the help of Daniel Rutter's "Dan's Data" review: "Arctic Cooling VGA Silencer", Review date: 6 February 2004. Last updated 26 February 2006 - for its description of the Artic Colling VGA Silencer.

NVIDIA Quadro FX 1000 cooling fan

Front and Back exteral views of the former cooling unit.

Using a cross point 0x40 screw driver one can remove the five small screws from the front of the cooling unit - Front internal view. The cover and screws.

The power to the fan passes under a rubber plug on the side of the heat sink, this can be easily removed with a pair of needle nose pliers. After removing the rubber plug, the small fan can be easily removed, buy removing three screws. However, I am not sure where one would find a replacement 12V DC 0.1A ~37mm fan.

After loosing the connectors which held the heat sink to the board and removing this fan I used a hot air gun to heat the heatsink and was able to remove the heatsink from the GPU chip. The chip was cleaned off using a small knife.

It was easy to attach the Artic Cooling device following the manufacturer's directions. It might also be worth noting that the mounting bracket has to be placed on the back of the card such that it is concave when the middle is placed against the board (i.e., the two ends need to stick out farther than the middle). Otherwise the rubber pad is not easily positioned and most importantly you don't get the compression force that you are trying to achieve when you tighten the screws.

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G.Q.Maguire Jr. (maguire@kth.se)
Last modified: 22 January 2015
© 2006,2015 G. Q. Maguire Jr., KTH/ICT/CoS

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