Assembly:
The review will be conducted on a
PowerColor Radeon X800 GTO pictured below. As you can see, the stock cooler has a decent design, with an oversized fan and many fins of aluminum to extract heat. There is no memory cooling, and in fact the GPU cooler actually interferes with the possibility of coolling a couple of the RAM chips. Additionally, although the cooler has never given me any problems, I do find it to be loud enough to be heard over a variety of case fans, which is obviously undesirable.
The above right image shows the default cooler removed, and the GPU cleaned of all the paste it came with. You can also see that this card uses just two mounting holes, and per the list we saw previously they should match up to one of the sets of mounts on the VF-900Cu.
The below left image details the results of the first thing I did... Put some thermal paste on, and do a quick fit up to see how well the cooler makes contact with the core. As you can see, the impression left in the paste is uniform and complete, telling me there will be good contact and therefore good heat transfer. The below right image shows all of the RAM sinks installed prior to installing the VGA cooler for good. The VF-900Cu overhangs many of the memory chips, so it is key to put the RAM sinks on first!
Below we see the back side of the card where two of the thumb nuts are sandwiching plastic washers against the back of the card as they hold the cooler securely in place.
And finally, we see the whole thing put together in the two images below. The whole thing looks pretty sharp, and seems to compliment the red and blue features of the X800 GTO. From start to finish, including my little fit up test, the whole installation took less than 15 minutes, and anyone with basic mechanical skills and confidence to take their system apart could handle it.
