ATI fan noise

Hi everyone,
I've just bought I ATI 9800 Pro 256MB Mac Special Edition, and the fan noise is extremely irritating.
I've been to xlr8yourmac.com and have seen a couple articles on replacing the fan with an Arctic Cooling VGA silencer and the Verax G03. Both operations seem a little hairy to me. A visit to the Arctic Cooling web site reveals newer products such as the ATI silencer 1 and 2.
Has anyone had any luck installing these types of products onto an ATI card and what was the result? Also, how difficult was the operation?
Thanks very much,
Christian

Hmm - it's all coming back now.
Verax instructions were not good - but xlr8 covers it pretty well.
Verax recommend using the power available at the optical drive, rather than connecting direct to the socket on the card, like the ATI fan.
Verax, unfortunately, supplied a single, direct Molex-type power connector with the G03, but their excellent support quickly sent the correct Y-connector, as shown on xlr8.
Twisting the ATI fan off the GPU takes guts - but may be made easier by warming the area to soften the thermal paste.
I don't know whether cleaning the old paste off to a mirror-finish is vital, but with nail-varnish remover(all I could find...) and cotton buds it takes a while and needs care to keep it off the surrounding PCB. Final clean with methylated spirits(denatured alcohol) as there are other ingredients in nail-varnish remover.
I used the thermal paste supplied by Verax - but used more than xlr8 suggest, as the GPU heat-sink was lower compared to the surrounding bits than in their photos, and it was the only way to get a good even contact.
Made sure I was grounded/earthed throughout - just in case.
Time taken...? Depends how thorough the cleaning, I suppose.
Not much more than an hour as I recall. Maybe two hours. More time spent reading and re-reading the instructions than actually doing the job!

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i am so happy, that i need to share this with everybody else:
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Hi Tangier,
did you install the necessary drivers? ATI DISPLAYS 4.5.7.
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http://www.redvent.com/images/card/1.jpg
http://www.redvent.com/images/card/2.jpg
http://www.redvent.com/images/card/3.jpg
http://www.redvent.com/images/card/4.jpg
http://www.redvent.com/images/card/5.jpg

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Message was edited by: jlseattle74

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http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/05/03/danishconsumer_complaints_board_claim_ibookdefect/
http://www.forbrug.dk/presse/nyheder/pressekit/ibookg4/ibook-g4-english/
http://www.coreyarnold.org/ibook/
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Hi,
Can you tell me if a loud CPU fan is normal for this computer?
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SOLVED: I spent some time with technical support and they had a model in the lab and confirmed that the loud fan noise is not by design. I returned my Touchsmart and received a new replacement and it is almost silent. I checked the BIOS and the fan speeds are reporting 1100 CPU Fan Speed and 2100 system fan speed with the same low temps above. I believe in my original machine they did not install fans right by swapping the plugins on the motherboard; I do not have solid evidence of this though.
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systemupdate le
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?sitestyle=lenovo&lndocid=MIGR-69701
eternal reboot
BIOSD attempt:" 2xjy26usa
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?sitestyle=lenovo&lndocid=MIGR-69701
error 1275 no admin priv - I AM the administrator account, there is no other acct to use!
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This does seem to duplicate other forum messages but I can't get anywhere on this. Help!
Solved!
Go to Solution.

FYI to all the helpful folks here (and any looking to shut their jet engine off as well): Flashing the BIOS did the trick.
First I had to find a website with DOS OS files and put those on the USB instead of Vista. Oldie but a goodie, but at least it booted! No other versions would.
I had been intending to use the WinPhlash utility that Lenovo supplied with the BIOS update but since I was booting from DOS that was useless. However, I found a DOS version of it and used that instead. Boom baby! Flashed and rebooted.
It did take two boots to get it back to normal (first one gave very alarming messages about no operating system being found but I think it was just a remnant of the reboot that was triggered from the DOS session). A second boot returned life to normal and blissful silence from the server. And I was finally able to get the model and serial number back in there to get rid of the bootup message it throws for that too.
Ahhhhhhh.
Thanks to all for the hints - I believe I had gotten the idea of flashing the BIOS to solve this from some other thread I found here. This is a very nice forum to have bookmarked.

HT3964 How do I stop my Macbook from overheating and making a fan noise?

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It gets annoying whenever I play a game, and then suddenly my Mac goes to sleep for no reason (probably due to overheating).
The fan noise is kept to a minimal when I use a web browser, or listen to music, but it goes up when I start an application.

Since overheating is something the computer tries to prevent, it will shut down if the temps get too hot, thus your experience is not overheating.
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ATI fan noise

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