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Mounting a cooling fan to a heat sink cooled graphics card

Graphics cards can become very hot during usage, especially if you run 3D applications on them. However, this may shorten their lifetime. To avoid that, you can improve the card's cooling by adding a fan.
One way for this is to insert a slot-insertable fan into the next slot on your motherboard on the heat sink side if you have a vacant slot there.
The other way is to DIY and mount a fan on the graphics card.

Here you can see an example of how to equip your heat sink cooled graphics card with a fan.
I used a Gigabyte nVidia GT 610 GPU card and a 3 wire AMD CPU fan.

Mounting the fan

When fastening the fan, I used the springs from ball point pens to provide tension and keep the fan pressed to the heat sink continuously. I've used a twisted pair of thin insulated wire guided through the screw holes at the corners of the fan to tie the fan to the heat sink.



Ensure that the springs don't pop through the screw holes in the corners of the fan.
Also, looking it from the side you should make sure that the fan doesn't reach the sink:



The power connector

This depends on your fan. If you have a 3 pin one, the power should be fed to the black (GND) and red (voltage) wires. You can do this via inserting some pins into the female connector. I've used the cut legs of a resistance. They must be thick enough to jam firmly into the holes and not fall out.



These wires will be connected to the black (GND) and red (+5V) wires of the power supply. (For full speed, you can connect to the yellow (+12V) instead of the red one, but in most cases 5 V is enough. This will make the fan run silently.)

The card in place

Insert the card into your PC. Double check that the fan is not blocked by any cable.

Notice that quite a part of the fan reaches over the heat sink, but this is no problem.

Connecting power

Connect the fan to the female floppy power connector of your PC power supply by pushing the 2 pins (inserted above) into it:



Black to black, red to red. (If you still want to use 12 V instead of 5 V, connect black-black, red-yellow)
The blue one remains unconnected.

Results

I've tested the effect of cooling with the 3D game Cogs.