Managed to pick up a Sapphire Radeon X1600 Pro 256MB new off eBay. Well, it said new and it really does look like it so no real reason to doubt it. Works great, but sounds like the fan is just going full blast constantly. Crazy noisy. Are there any practical solutions to this, or does my search for a useful card for MOS need to continue?

Back when the card was out, almost 20 years ago, a Zalman silent cooler was an aftermarket option but getting one of them now is probably not going to be easy or cheap. Any other options?

[EDIT] Found this and might give it a go, it's cheap enough but will take a couple of weeks to get here so probably coming from China: https://amzn.eu/d/c7lhm8P

[ Edited by MartinW 01.05.2025 - 01:08 ]

Good luck! Given that the fan only has a 2-pin header, it doesn't look like it could even be controlled by software. You could try to lower its voltage to reduce the noise level...

I always try to find the fanless cards, even if they're a bit slower.

> probably coming from China

You bet.

"Business Name: guang zhou yi dan mao yi you xian gong si
[…]
Business Address:
huangpudadaoxi33hao8louABfangzhiL065
guangzhoushi
tianhequ
guangdongsheng
510620
CN"
https://www.amazon.co.uk/sp?seller=A17VFLQO3CIQKZ

I ordered from AliExpress in the end. Cheaper and gets here quicker!

I do have a fanless card but it doesn't support 3D. While I'm not a fan of low poly count early 3D games, it’s surprising how often 3D comes up elsewhere.

It’s possible the card itself has some fan control built in since the speed definitely varies during boot and initialisation but it seems to settle at full speed. Maybe the heatsink isn't attached well after all these years. Will investigate when the different fan arrives and i also get a different ssd.

Don't suppose there's any way to monitor the temperature of the card from the software side is there? As expected, the replacement fan is still noisy, even though it's considerably more pleasant than the stock fan. I'm going to start messing with the fan voltage but it would be nice to have some visibility of temps.

I'm wondering how would a totally passive cooler (like Arctic Accelero S1 Plus) fare with your Radeon X1600.

Wow, that's huge! I've got a temperature probe on it at the moment but it's not really telling me anything. The best I can do is just push it down into the area immediately below where the fan sits and that's just telling me it's 25C. That bears no relation to the core temp of the card at all so largely useless. It looks like there isn't any sensor data available at all from the X5000 board so I'm guessing the same is true of the GPU.

I wound up reducing the fan speed with a resistor (about 65 ohms if I remember correctly) that has made it really very quiet. Unfortunately I don’t have any way to measure temperature than to put my finger on the back right where the GPU chip is and I have to say, it’s not hot. Barely warm. I really wish there was something more scientific I could do.

I need to change the resistor to one of a higher wattage. 1/2W isn’t really enough so now I know how quiet it is I might go a bit faster with the fan. Outside of that, it’s keep an eye on it and if it dies, it dies. I tried 😂

@MartinW,

You canb put a backplate with a button rotating or horizontal with 2 3 or 4 positions. You will have then to plug the wires somewhere on your graphiccard. Then with that button you may adjust the fan speed but not to low otherwise the gpu would die.

On os4depot I have found 3 tools to show the temperatures of cpu on x5000, https://os4depot.net/share/utility/workbench/cputemp.lha, https://os4depot.net/share/utility/docky/x5000temp.lha , https://os4depot.net/share/utility/workbench/x5000-mcu-watcher.lha . About the last one I do not know exactly what is a mcu. As anyone the answer, with their words if possible ?

Brumiga

[ Edité par Brumiga 08.05.2025 - 22:46 ]

Quote:

I believe the MCU on an X5000 board is like a management chip that you can access programmatically. It's all in the manual. You can also connect to a serial port (not the one on the back) and send commands to the MCU that way and get responses back. From memory I don't remember the stuff that you can get out of it but I think it's stuff like voltage sensors, temperature sensors and so on. But as far as I recall you're not going to get GPU temp out of any of this.

I already use the monitoring tools from OS4 depot under OS4 but of course that doesn't help since the GPU is not supported under OS4 even if those tools could read the info from it.