zalman vf700 cooling system hack

I have bought a brand new Innovision Geforce 6600GT AGP card 1-2 months ago. Its cooler was very loud, and it wasn't efficient enough. Some games simply overheated it, that made the computer reboot.

After some weeks the cooler became louder and louder. Then it didn't even wanted to start at all, so my videocard has became useless.
I decided to change the cooler for a better one. Looking around the web I figerued out that there are no coolers at all that would fit on this card perfectly. Finally I bought a Zalman VF700AlCu LED cooler dispite of the manufacturer doesn't really recommends it. read

The box includes the cooler itself, memory heatsinks and  everything that is needed (+ some spare bolts).
The surface of the cooler seems quite fine:

After removing the original cooler from the card you can see this:

The 4 pieces of RAM modules are so close to the GPU that the memory heatsink cannot be installed along with the GPU cooler.
The mechanical work is quite easy, the manual helps you. The cooler on the card will look like this:

The chip of the AGP bridge luckily avoids the cooler.

Inside the case it has enough space:

And when you turn the whole thing on:

The performance seems to be much better than the original one. On idle it is around 56C and under pressure it is around 70C.
I am satisfied with the result.

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pohar 2006.01.09.

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