Woot, my ram came in today (G.Skill RMA turn-around time FTW :thumbsup
so I was able to get my system powered up for some tests.
Here's what I did with the GPU, first I took out the dremel with a metal cut blade and cut the standoff posts in half:
^ you can see the springs I bought laying in the background of that photo. They were $0.75 each, I only used two for this project.
Here's the uncut spring jacketing the sawed off post:
I cut the ends off each spring (using the dremel cutter again), here are the spring-jacketed posts now:
Here's one final shot of the polished Accelero HSF surface:
For the
first attempt, I added an very small dot of
Noctua NT-H1 TIM:
^ This turned out to be too little, I failed to grab a photo showing how much the TIM spread across the silicon surface but it did not cover corner-to-corner and I knew something was amiss because the screen was artifacting during the BIOS initialization phase of booting the computer.
I took off the Accelero and cleaned off the NT-H1, then added a much larger dollop:
^ that turned out to be the right amount. No artifacting now :thumbsup:
I've got OCCT running now on the GPU, I'll update the thread with temp results as soon as I have them