ABit Siluro GF4 Ti4200
Making OTES quieter
The author of the review has to use the PC almost round the clock and leave it running for nightly tests, sleep by the PC on those days when hundreds of megabytes of archives need to be downloaded. It's natural that the very first night spent with the OTES I had a strong desire to cut the patented rig off and throw it away because of the immense noise made. Hardly suppressing the destructive thoughts, I decided to find a way to deaden the OTES noise.
The easiest way is to reduce the RPMs of the turbine. As I once said, the card we received for tests was in fact a GeForce 4 Ti 4200 with the memory and GPU speeds overclocked to a Ti 4400 level. It's quite logical that prior to degrading the performance of the cooling system it's necessary the chip clock speed be reduced to standard values with the use of the NVTweak utility.
Of course, after that you can't expect a record level of performance achieved through overclocking. You would simply have to forget about the overclocking, and it's quite reasonable to reduce the operating clock speeds of the chip and memory. It's easy to revert the clock speeds back. So let's get round to describing the process.
The OTES turbine is powered from a special connector on the accelerator. The contact is made with two pins. To do a basic tuning, we'd need the following tool kit:
- a plug suitable for the turbine connector;
- two wires;
- a "female" connector to be plugged to the "males" of the system power supply;
- soldering iron;
- two hands, skillful enough.
Take the connectors and solder the wires to them. The first of the wires is "+5V", the second is the "ground" wire. The wiring on the base is done in the following way:
As a result, we get a much slower but practically noiseless OTES. Despite that, the cooler is still quite efficient. When no hard 3D applications are used, the chip stays scarcely warm. But if you wish to run Unreal Tournament 2003 or something harder, it makes sense reverting to the normal power scheme.
The second option is dynamical. For that we would need a special block able to control the fan's rotational speed. For a change, try using the block that comes bundled with Zalman or Thermaltake coolers and hook up an OTES cooler to it in parallel. Want quietness? - turn the regulator down to the minimum and you get a quiet cooler for the processor and accelerator. Want to play? - put on the ear-phones and turn all up to the maximum. We won't dwell on this in our review now - we might publish a separate article describing the tuning process in detail.
Findings
It's hard to give one-one conclusions on the OTES. On the one hand, it offers high performance, good overclocking potentials, smart and tricky cooling system that expels used air off the PC case. On the other hand, the noise levels generated by the turbine rotating at 7200 rpm is very high, it lacks radiators on the memory chips and, worse than that, you simply can't install third-party sets, plus the high price for Ti4200 as compared with competitor products.
What is more, you have to worry about tuning the turbine and reducing its RPMs. With a little bit more skills you can turn the OTES into part of a noiseless PC which is more effective than other competitor solutions owing to air expulsion off the PC case.
Wrapping it all up, we believe OTES is a not bad solution for those who know if it is worth paying extra dollars for the tuned accelerator model; those who own transparent stylish PC cases with highlights or windowed cases should be really happy about that.
Cons:
- No control for the rotational speed;
- No cooling of the memory chips and now way installing third-party sets;
- Very high noise levels in the rated mode.
Pros:
- Hot air is expelled off the PC case, which substantially improved the thermal conditions of the PC case;
- Increased overclocking potentials of the chip;
- Turbine tuning is more important than tuning the coolers for standard GeForce 4 Ti4200.
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