The Doctor tackles busted coolers, bad GPUs, and PCs in need of some cleaning
Busted Frozr
Doc, I’ve got an aging Nvidia GTX 570 card from MSI that came with a Twin Frozr II cooler. While considering the possibility of either an upgrade or SLI configuration, I noticed the temperatures on my GPU were getting very high according to the monitoring software I use, especially under load. After investigating, I discovered one of the fans on my card had completely seized up while the other stuttered and barely ran at all. I’ve since removed and cleaned the card, disassembled the Twin Frozr II assembly to gain access to the fans’ rear area in an attempt to perform a lube, and reinstalled everything. After all that I discovered I’d completely failed to coax either fan back to life.
I now have a quasi-serviceable video card that lacks a working cooler (I found one option to buy a replacement fan bundle, but it’s sourced in China and comes with hefty import fees). As things stand, anything more taxing than short streaming videos pushes temps up to and beyond 90 C. My rig has been hobbled, and I don’t like it. I’m now seeing phantom longevity issues with heatsink/fan combination coolers wherever I look. I’m needing some reassurances that if I buy a new card today, I won’t end up in the same situation a few years down the road. Also, an explanation as to why no one seems to offer an off-the-shelf water cooling solution for GPUs would be good. —Brandon Kalaskie
The Doctor Responds: Our main advice is to examine the manufacturer’s warranty before purchase. For video cards, warranties typically range from three to five years, which should be sufficient given how fast technology advances, but we realize some people aren’t always able to upgrade. If your product fails once it’s past that warranty period, well, there’s not much you can do. Many of us actually look forward to such a failure, as it gives us a spouse-proof excuse to upgrade.
For your case, there are aftermarket solutions both in the air and water realms. For air coolers there are a ton of options that fall under the Google phrase “VGA cooling.” Arctic Cooling is the most prolific, as it’s been making add-on coolers for GPUs for as long as we can remember. The primary consideration for these coolers is to make sure they’re able to cool the onboard components and memory of the card, as they can get just as hot as the GPU at full load. Most coolers have heatsinks you can apply to the memory modules and an airflow pattern that washes over the rest of the components, but make sure you’re not ignoring the overall board temps in favor of just monitoring your GPU temp. Also, our Google Fu shows us the Zalman VF3000 is specifically designed for your GTX 570 card, and there are a few of them for sale on eBay.
On the liquid cooling front you have a few options. First NXZT makes a GPU cooling system called the Kraken G10 that’s compatible with the GTX 570 and costs $30. You still need to bring your own closed-loop liquid cooler (CLC), but it’ll work with a variety listed on the product page: http://bit.ly/krakeng10. Its thermal coverage isn’t as good as a block designed for custom liquid cooling, but going that route would cost as much as simply replacing the card. You’ll need a fan mount inside your case for the G10’s CLC, too, so make sure your case can accommodate this. Corsair has also announced a liquid cooling solution for GPUs named the HG10. It also requires you purchase a seperate Hydro Series liquid CPU cooler, just like with the NZXT. Sadly the Corsair cooler is vaporware at this point, and we’ve no idea when it will appear on the retail horizon.
There are plenty of aftermarket options for GPU cooling, including air and water-based setups.
SLI Gone Bad
I have a Dell XPS 730 that had dual Nvidia GeForce 9800GT cards in SLI Mode. A week ago my screen went haywire so I removed one card at a time and found one to be the culprit. I had great performance with both cards in SLI mode. Now that I have just one card, perfomance is much worse. Since I don’t have a whole lot of money to spend (maybe up to the mid-toupper $300 range), what would be a good replacement card(s) that meet or exceed the dual 9800GT SLI performance? —Robert Orsino
The Doctor Responds: According to an exhaustive Google scouring, the Dell XPS 730 uses an ancient Intel Core 2 Quad CPU. While we could recommend a decent video card in the $250-$300 range, it’ll be bottlenecked by that sluggish CPU. It’s always important to match your CPU’s overall power with your GPU’s. Given your CPU’s level, we think you’ll get better value out of a midrange GPU such as the AMD Radeon R9 285 or the Nvidia GeForce GTX 760.
Super Slow
Hey doc, I hope you can give me some direction on this. So, my parents bought a new Dell PC about four years ago. It’s running Windows 7, has 6GB of RAM, a 1TB HDD, a graphics card (not sure which one), and most of all an AMD Phenom X6 CPU at 3GHz. It was a great deal when my dad found it, and for what they do, I thought it would be perfect! I thought the Phenom X6 would be blazing fast. My mom mostly surfs the net and does some light picture editing.
Well, a little while after they got it, my mom complained about how slow it seemed, so I went over there one weekend and attempted to use their PC. It took over five minutes to see the start of the desktop and another five minutes before I could click on anything. Then Internet Explorer kept freezing on me. The HDD is only 15 percent full, so I know a full HDD isn’t the problem. I bet there is some bloatware that could be removed, but it just seems SO slow that there has to be something else going on. Any recommendations on where to start? Do you think maybe the HDD is just that slow? I mentioned an SSD to them and reinstalling the OS, but they’re not sure they want to do that unless it’s the only way. Any help would be wonderful. —Jarod Myrick
The Doctor Responds: First off Jarod, we’re positive many people reading this are feeling PTSD symptoms from having to fix a slow PC for relatives. It’s probably the most common ailment for your garden variety rig out there in the wild, and back when The Doc was a PC repair technician the number one problem we had to deal with—PCs full of bloatware, viruses, toolbars, antivirus programs, and worse. Seeing those PCs in such a sorry state always broke our hearts. The good news is we have some baseline tactics.
First, comb through the Programs and Features menu in the Control Panel and remove any program not being used. Sometimes Malware likes to hide in plain sight. Next take a look at what’s starting automatically by typing “msconfig” into the search box in the Windows Start menu. This will display services and programs that start automatically every time your PC boots. You’ll want to check the box labeled “Hide all Microsoft services” before purging, but once those are cleared just examine the list and use your judgement. You probably need your antivirus or fan control service to start automatically, but not an app that checks for updates on a piece of software you give zero effs about. When it comes to the Startup tab, this is where you’ll see a real difference in boot times and overall readiness after boot. Be careful here, but keep in mind that whatever you uncheck can always be rechecked if a problem arises.
We also recommend downloading and installing the excellent free utility CCleaner, as it can quickly and easily remove excess files. As a bonus it also has a built-in Startup utility that is much more extensive than the one included with Windows. It can be found under the Tools menu.
With those basics out of the way, we gotta say your parents’ PC sounds like it has an old skool virus or malware infestation. We recommend starting off with Malwarebytes, which is free and great at ferreting out malware. Next scan with SuperAntiSpyware, which is also free and generally excellent. For a virus scan, instead of going to the store (virtual or brick), just run a browser-based scan like the one available from Bitdefender. It’s free, fast, and can help.
If you do all of the above you should see an improvement. For boot times, we would normally expect a Windows 7-based “mom and dad” rig to boot in about a minute with an HDD running the show. Installing an SSD could drop that to 30 seconds or so, but not even an SSD can overcome a total system infestation. Our advice is to clean the system, then install an SSD to help keep the system running at breakneck speed so you don’t have to go over there anymore.
In addition to removing unwanted files from your PC, the excellent and free CCleaner also has a powerful Startup examination utility.
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