So anyways, I got it home and went about installing it onto the card. My biggest problem was trying to get the old heatsink off which I was trying to do by using a pair of plyers and getting the little plastic pegs back through the pcb board. After trying that for about 5 minutes I gave up and used some wire cutters and just sniped the ends of which was a whole lot easier. You can push the hooks through to make them stick out from the card a little more which makes it easier to get a pair of cutters in there and then just snip the ends of. After getting the heatsink of I went about installing the ramsinks which I quickly realized don't fit on the memory along with the actual gpu heatsink, and thus I just left them off since there was never anything on them before anyways. I did manage to get one mostly covering the one memory bank and since it was stuck on there pretty good I left it (as you can see in the picture). Other than those two problems the install was very easy and just required following the instructions. I've got the fan hooked up to the 5V output from the attached fan controller which makes it run very quite (I can't hear it over the hard drive anyways). The 12V output probably helps cooling alot but does produce alot more noise obviously. I loaded up some counter strike source and it played without any problems, and the machine has been running now for hours without any issues.
Here is a before and after shot of the card:
posted at: 22:29 | path: /general | permanent link to this entry