ABit Siluro GF4 Ti4200
OTES - space technologies in desktop PCs.
The OTES (Outside Thermal Exhaust System) can be called with some reserve a novelty on the 3D accelerators market. Not long ago a similar system was demonstrated on eVGA accelerators which successfully avoided wide publicity. This alone would be more than enough to award Abit with one other three prizes, the first for the original and nice cooling system. Another prize which Abit wins in the tests described below is for the superb cooling of the GPU core. But the third prize we award Abit for the nasty cooling of the graphic memory. Things are aggravated by that basically the card can't be upgraded and the memory issue can't be improved somehow.
Meanwhile, the situation is indeed serious. While with the ordinary cooler the hot air circulation somehow organized, with OTES all the air is simply expelled away from the case. What is more, the OTES is so large that it's impossible to install third-party radiators on the memory. To be more precise, this can be done on the rear side of the boards and on the memory located along the board's end side. And this is impossible for the upper chips half covered by a cooling element. In the end, any tuning is ineffective and not to the point.
What exactly is OTES, what does it do, and how good is it at its intended purpose? The OTES abbreviation stands for "Outside Thermal Exhaust System". The system is based on the so-called "heatpipe scheme".
The heatpipe is a pipe in which there is some small amount of easily evaporating liquid (e.g. freon used in refrigerators) circulating around it which then evaporates on the hotter side, travels back down to the start of the pipe, and starts the process over again. The process is absolutely standalone and does not require external replenishment and follows the fundamental laws of physics. Such systems were first used in cosmonautics around 40 years ago. One of the reasons for using heatpipes is the space limitations and impossibility to provide cooling in the heated spot. Today heatpipes are common and are most popular for cooling notebooks. The essence of the method is that heat is effectively transferred to the radiator where it is carried off while being blown.
Later this technology acquired wide application in radio electronics and afterwards in the computer industry. Besides notebooks, heatpipes were implemented in processor coolers as well, in particular, in Master DP5-5K11. Furthermore, at the Californian Intel Developers Forum several companies demonstrated similar cooling solutions for desktop PCs. As the heat intensity and compactness of desktop systems progress, there won't be other methods for their cooling.
But let's come back to OTES. In this case all is implemented in the following scheme: the fan installed on top of the graphic chip does not cool it directly, but simply swallows ambient air and channels it through the established duct over to the outlet in the keeper strip. Inside the duct the air is channeled through the copper radiator fins that cool one of the ends of the cooling system. The other end is in tight contact with the chip. Therefore, a chemical reaction inside the pipe starts as soon as the chip is heated to a certain extent.
You can see that Abit was not supposed to install a turbine impeller right above the graphic chip. Moreover, while above it the turbine does not touch the chip at all. Equally well, Abit could have implemented air suction or displaced the turbine a bit in order to provide effective cooling of the memory chips.
One of the serious OTES issues is the noise generated by the turbine. The turbine motor rotates the impeller at the speed 7200 rpm. For comparisons, in the top-end models of processor coolers the impeller rotates at the speed 5500 rpm, while quiet coolers are regarded those where the impeller rotates at the speed around 1500-2000 rpm. It's possible to reduce the OTES noise only through decelerating the turbine rotation, but there are no delicate methods for doing that - Abit has not yet devised a means for controlling the turbine rotational speed. Currently, Abit is working at OTES2 system and soon we'll be able to examine it. Below in this review we'll tell how to make OTES1 quieter.
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