Getting Performance

symbiote · Post by **symbiote** » Sun Oct 31, 2004 7:42 am

For sure, cooling down the cards is definitely a good idea. Tell us how it works if you try the VGA ram sinks trick!

astroman · Post by **astroman** » Sun Oct 31, 2004 7:44 am

yes cleanbluesky, I can reliably reproduce that 'problem' - but that's a natural matter of fact due to my system's physical layout.
The boards are mounted on a risercard flipped 90 degrees fom the regular slot position, so heat cannot dissipate vertically as in a slot.

The sandwich of the 2 Pulsars is additionally fired from below by the CPU sitting half an inch under the first Pulsar, which is bent about 1/10 of inch upward by a piece or rubber so the fan doesn't get stuck by a capacitor on the board.

The CPU fan runs at 5 V as does the additonal one blowing from the front into the direction of the cards...

It's a very silent and portable setup, but I admit it's more of a challenge (how much can be ftted in a case) than reasonably built

Nevertheless it's remarkably stable

cheers, Tom

Stige · Post by **Stige** » Sun Oct 31, 2004 7:50 am

like the UAD-1, which isn't a graphics card anyway (I guess if you're really motivated, you could hack some PCI card with DVI in and figure out a way to get stuff back into the computer ^_^.))

yes UAD-1 is not a graphics card, but the cpu used in it is a video processor. This is the exact description of the DSP chip in uad-1 card:
Xenon Microsystems Chromatic Mpact 2 Video Adapter

astroman · Post by **astroman** » Sun Oct 31, 2004 7:59 am

the ram heatsinks won't have any effect if the air isn't moved away from the cards - after a short time there will be a heat stuck.

cheers, Tom

cleanbluesky · Post by **cleanbluesky** » Sun Oct 31, 2004 12:26 pm

Hmmmm. On further inspectsion some of the SHARCs (and other large chips) on my Pulsar II are occluded by the daughter board thingy that sits near the back of the board (where the cable snake attatches). I would only stick ramsinks on any of the SHARCs if I could stick them on ALL of the SHARCs as I expect running some hotter than the others would be less productive than running them all hot. Instead I am going to settle for sticking two extractor fans in my PC, one at bottom and one through PCI slot 1 (yes, VGA silencer for an unashamed gamer). I have a mobo controlled fan on the CPU, and when the CPU usage goes to 100% for a sustained time it starts spinning at full speed. I took the case off to see if the extra air made a difference and it didn't get even a litle bit faster than minimum settings and the heatsink wasn't even that hot. The hard-drives were a little cooler and the Pulsar remained a good temperature. I think that extra fans will do a good job here, along with replacing the case and PSU (its starting to whine)