7970 aftermarket cooler

[taq8ojh]

I am looking for alternatives to the infamous default cooler for 7970 (which I am going to buy soon). Preferrably one that would allow me to freely use any fans I want (=I am not interested in Arctic Cooling products), and has reasonable memory/VRM heatsinks (in case I won't be able to keep the plate from the default cooler mounted on).
Any tips welcome.

 

[dma0991]

Spoiler

Subliminal message.

:sneaky:

 

[taq8ojh]

rofl

I wish I was water guy. Sadly, this is not the path I chose in life.

 

[dma0991]

Prolimatech MK-26. The aftermarket VGA heatsinks have really shrunk since I last checked. There used to be Zalman and Thermalright but I guess aftermarket heatsinks(MSI Twin Frozr IV, Asus DCUII) have made third party heatsinks a redundant purchase. Arctic Cooling seems to be the only active manufacturer still in the VGA heatsink market.

 

[taq8ojh]

Wait, what's the difference between aftermarket and third party? I thought it was the same thing.

 

[dma0991]

Stock heatsinks are AMD/Nvidia reference ones, typically blower style. Aftermarket are ones that are proprietary to manufacturer such as MSI, Asus, Gigabyte, etc. Aftermarket and third party can mean the same thing but in the context of this discussion, aftermarket will be heatsinks that comes pre-installed by the manufacturers and third party are ones that are installed by you.

 

[taq8ojh]

Ah, so when someone wants to buy aftermarket cooler, he really means third party. I get it.

Anyway... I found another giant abomination of a cooler. The Deepcool Dracula. That thing is humongous. Still surprising how none of the companies actually care to make real heatsinks for rest of the card. In my opinion, cooling the GPU is not that much of a problem anymore, and hasn't been for years.

 

[dma0991]

I think that manufacturers have done a great deal of work to get aftermarket coolers that performs better than the stock blower. I'm not sure how real heatsink should be but they've done quite well as they have to meet the two slot width constraint that caters to a broad range of users.

The Deepcool Dracula would be better but not many would want a single card that takes up five slots, preventing the possibility of a multi GPU setup. Even Asus slimmed down their current DirectCU II from three slots to two slots.

 

[monkeydelmagico]

Gelid icy vision? I researched it a bit before deciding to water cool. Seems like a reasonably priced kit.