Installation

When it comes to installing an aftermarket heatsink, the first step is to remove the original. I will be testing this one on an 8800GTS from PNY. You can see the underside of the stock cooler below. It has a solid copper base, a single aluminium heatpipe and aluminium blocks which sit on top of the RAM chips. These are seated with thermal pads which have a horrible consistency and fall apart at the lightest touch. I would hope that real RAM sinks with "proper" thermal pads will work better.

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After cleaning up the core, it's time to reapply the heatpaste. In this review, as with every other cooler one, we used AS5 and used our Jetart spatula of sorts to spread it evenly across the chip.

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After that step I cleaned all of the RAM chips using TIM Clean which tends to be more effective than white spirit or nail polish remover. It also smells a hell of a lot better. Then I attached the new RAM and PWM sinks and the large one to the display chip. Looks pretty good I think.

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Then we add the cooler... doesn't look quite so good now but I'll run with it.

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When it came to installing the card back into my PC, it was quite a tight fit with the Hurricane actually resting on my Auzentech Prelude which sits just below the first PCI-E 16x slot. Even when taking off the shroud, the clearance from the sound card is very small. The stock cooler doesn't extend this far.

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