With the FrostyTech GF4TEC Active Heatsink installed on the MSI GF4 Ti4600 and the card plugged into an Epox 8K3A+ there isn't a whole lot of room left for anything else - and we like it that way. :) This is not supposed to be a "practical" videocard cooler, it is an "extreme" attempt at below ambient cooling. The key is below ambient and not below zero. The temperatures we saw when running the MSI video card through benchmarks were well below ambient room temperatures (about 25 degrees Celsius), but not low enough to pose any real problems with condensation.

The small wire you can see off to the left is a thermocouple used for temperature measurements. The thermocouple is mounted to the side of the GeForce 4 GPU so it can take an accurate reading of the copper plate temperature. With a little neoprene gasketting and some more insulation I'm sure we could get things even colder, but then condensation may become an issue. Water and $500 videocards is not something we like to mix unless that water is doing what we want it to!

So how cold were we able to get an overclocked GeForce 4 Ti4600 to run at? Running at stock speeds of 300MHz core / 660MHz memory in idle the Frosty GF4TEC maintained a temperature of between 12-14 degrees Celsius. Ambient room temperature was 25 degrees though out the tests. At that stock speed our test system was able to grab a score of 10,238 3DMarks no sweat (literally).

Overclocking the MSI GeForce 4 Ti4600 to 346MHz core / 660MHz memory brought the temperature up to about 14.5-15.5 degrees Celsius which is still very nice indeed as we ran through the benchmarks. Since we ran the Athlon XP 1700+ at stock speeds, and didn't overclock the memory in any of the tests we are looking at a pure core overclock of 46MHz which netted us a new 3Dmark score of 10,786.

That's an overclocked Geforce 4 Ti4600 running at a core speed of 346MHz (previous high was 325MHz with standard cooling) with a temperature of just 15.5 degrees Celsius. With a few tweaks to the Frosty GF4TEC Active Heatsink we can probably even get that overclocked temperature down some more!

If you have any comments about the FrostyTech GeForce4 cooling Project be sure to stop by the forums and speak your mind.