How ABIT's FX5800 sported wiser cooling than Nvidia's own Dustbuster

THERE IS A BOSNIAN saying that it's better to do something late than never to do it at all. Well, even though it may be an old story, I cannot help but mention the controversy that was going on about the cooling solution for the FX5800.

Anyone who saw any OTES cards, like the one pictured below with Nvidia's NV30, could not help noticing that the two cards look very similar. OTES stands for "Outside Thermal Exhaust System" and this is exactly what Nvidia and ABIT did in the case of the FX5800.

ABIT, as one of Nvidia's partners, produced version of the NV30 card but they decided not to go for the now well-known Dust Buster solution. Rather, the company wanted to go for its own solution based on its own OTES cooling. Well, we all know that all NV30s came from Flextronix and that no one else could change a thing apart from the cooling in the case of the NV30 Ultra, or in the case of the Geforce FX 5800 Ultra, not even that.

Only a few people know that Nvidia needed a cooling solution for its upcoming chip NV30 and, for this, they knew that they could use some help. That's why they invited ABIT to jump in and bring its OTES knowledge to the party.

Obviously, ABIT said yes to score some points at Nvidia and sent over few of its bright engineers to help Nvidia to cool down a card that should and did rock at 500 MHz Core and a magnificent 1000 MHz DDR 2 memory. Well, ABIT started to work with Nvidia but after some time ABIT engineers insisted on going back to Taiwan because Nvidia chose to ignore most of their advice. We believe that this was a battle of pride as the Taiwanese could not stand having their ideas ignored. ABIT got their boys home and Nvidia engineers completed the project without them and we all know how the "Dust Buster" story finished. Well, the one that was finished by Nvidia engineers was just too noisy.

At least, that's ABIT's side of story.

Since our own Paul Dutton has a history in the cooling industry and since we know quite a few people from the same industry, we heard whispers that Nvidia's cooling solution was very ineffective. The GPU was not so warm, it was always a problem of the DDR 2 memory getting too hot.

Nvidia's solution was to take cold air from outside the case, tunnelling it across the extremely hot memory then getting it over the GPU, resulting in heating the GPU with hot air heated by the memory and then extracting this warm air out of the case. You could easily feel the heat when you where around a Geforce FX 5800 Ultra.

Well we didn't want to test performance of ABIT's OTES 3 FX 5800 but we just wanted to report that ABIT had a much less noisy and more effective solution then Nvidia. ABIT was able to cool the memory with heatsinks, but we have to add that ABIT only did FX 5800 non Ultra where the memory is clocked at 800 MHz. Nevertheless, they told us that they could create the same or very similar solution for FX 5800 Ultra efficiently enough even to cool its 1000 MHz memory.

We reckon that even the FX 5900 from ABIT has a nice cooling solution but we didn't have the opportunity to play with it.

The point is that the ABIT FX 5800 OTES 3 was noisy as well but much less than Nvidia's solution as I did happen to hear them both.

This will get you to think that NV30 could be cooled much more quietly than it was. Nvidia did a respin, introducing the FX 5900 Ultra shortly afterwards but they and their partners are still healing their wounds caused by the NV30 generation of product.

For comparison, we took a liberty and show you an image of the Geforce FX 5900 Ultra which is the property of Anandtech from its original January review.

Who knows, maybe the NV30 would not carry its Dustbusting reputation now if ABIT had finished its project with Nvidia. µ