Mike Sprecher, who describes himself as a "longtime clock and hardware chipper," offered some words of caution for those looking to disconnect the fan from their ATI card inside a G4:
"The danger comes with 3D applications. Modern video chips turn off unused functional units as the G3 CPU does. This means that when you browse in the Finder, only the 2D units are working, maybe even one pipeline only. As soon as you double-click on Deus Ex for example, OpenGL gets loaded and initializes the 3D chip.
"Now it gets hot very quickly, consuming much more power to power up the 3D units inside the chip. The ATI Rage128 for example - with the no-fan card - is reaching 90 degrees Celsius during game play - a value not dangerous to the silicon immediately (up to 120...140 degrees depending on die), but it might break after a while.
"Heat is getting an issue more and more. Not only related to convectional cooling such as in the cube. If i think about my Voodoo3-2000, i replaced the voltage controllers heat sink (which wasn't really one), because the former green-PCB-board would become slightly brown around the regulator."
(taken from MacInTouch, today)
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