- Jul 18, 2003
- 12,393
- 1,061
- 126
Stuff I used.
1) Zalman VF700-AlCu cooler.
2) Extra set of Zalman ZM-RHS1 - See here for pic.
You get four larger RAMsinks and four small ones like the eight that come with the VF700 cooler.
3) Arctic Alumina Thermal Epoxy (5min cure time and they aren't kidding one bit)
My experience:
Removing the stock HSF was easy enough, just unscrew all 14 or 15 screws holding it on and unplug the fan. The VF700 fits the GPU core just perfectly and the included instructions with the Zalman unit are self-explanatory. I used some left over Arctic Silver 3 I had on hand for the GPU interface material.
The RAMsinks obviously need to be applied to the eight RAM chips and I've never had good luck with the thermal tape they come with, so I removed the sticky tape and used some alumina epoxy on those. The power circuitry consists of a three small boxes (3x1) and three sets of three (3x3) very small chips. It would be nearly impossible to get the epoxy right using something conductive, which is why I decided against using silver epoxy and opted for the alumina.
The top two sets of power circuitry were very easy to cool using one of the larger Zalman RAMsinks from the ZM-RHS1 kit for each of the (3x1) boxes and a smaller RAMsink for two of the (3x3) clusters of chips.
The back of the card near the 6pin power plug looks like so...
(@ symbol is 3x1 sets of chips and * is the smaller 3x3 sets)
@**
*
@**
*
@ *
*
*
Here was the only tricky part. In the bottom set of power circuitry chips there were two issues. One issue is that a single RAMsink won't cover the line of three small chips on the bottom row and the other issue is that even if it could there is a large capacitor nearby getting in your way. What I did to solve this issue is very carefully remove the shroud from the original HSF, put the original HS in a vice, and very carefully smash it with a frickin' hammer leaving behind the bottom right corner of the original HSF in the vice. This piece of metal is conveniently formed perfectly to the bottom set of power circuitry and has two mounting holes already tapped into it after the breakage. I used a little white alumina thermal paste and screwed two of the screws back into the board for a final power circuitry heatsink.
Results - Idle is sitting at Windows desktop and load is after 10min of ATI Tool fuzzy cube error scanning thingy(TM).
Stock
Idle = 53°C
Load = 92°C at 29% fan and 82°C at 40% fan
Zalman VF700 with a bunch of RAMsinks
Idle = 42°C
Load = 62°C
Facebook
Twitter