So having been rather unimpressed with the stock cooler on my BFG 8800GT I decidied some aftermarket cooling was in order. Technically Thermalright are releasing a specific GT version of the HR-03 cooler but its not in stores yet and knowing them they'll be charging an additional premium over all their other revisions as they always do.

So I went with the Rev.A version, which is still compatible with the 8800GT, but just has 4 heatpipes instead of 6 and doesn't quite come with enough ramsinks for the 8800GT.

Here's the card with the stock cooler removed:



As you can see there aren't enough of the silver thermalright sinks to cover everything but luckily I had a bunch of the Zalman ones spare, so went ahead and stuck them on every avaliable surface.



Strangely the two short heatsinks (necessary to allow room for the heatpipes on the main cooler) have absolutely terrible sticky thermal pads so I had quite a job making them stick. Make sure you get the ram chips as clean as possible. The larger ram sinks are just as good as the Zalman ones.

And here it is with the main heatsink attached. You can mount it either way up, so its either hanging below the card as I've done, or wrapped around the top.




Strapped on a 92mm fan for good measure and into the case it goes.




Now for the results:

With the stock cooler I was getting 59C idle and 91C eek under load. But note that this was with the stock fan running relatively quietly. With it sounding like a jet engine the load temp was around 85C

With the fan running at 60% on the HR-03 (not audible above the rest of my case fans) the 8800GT idles at 38C and under load gets no higher than 54C

That's excellent mate, nice job

Overclocking results please

Matthew

Very nice bit of cooling going on there. Well done

Got 725/1816/1920 quite easily first time around. Probably can go a bit higher. Also I cranked the fan up another 10% which didn't make much difference to the noise but got the load temp down to 50C.

Interestingly under load the memory sinks are only warm to the touch, whereas the base of the heatpipes is very hot, as you'd expect. Which makes me wonder if the stock hsf would actually be heating up the memory chips by having them attached to the same heatsink as the gpu.

The memory does actually get incredibly hot Gatsby. I initially didn't attach the ramsinks with my Zalman VF900, until I noticed they were way too hot to touch as soon as you run a 3d game. I don't doubt though that the stock heatsink is definately heating everything up, especially the memory. Nice temps btw, mine is idling at 43, 60ish under load but obviously is a much smaller cooler

Hmm I guess the little zalman sinks are enough to keep them relatively cool then.

Just clocked it up to 740/1854/2000 and played Crysis for a half hour with no problems. Will loop 3Dmark later on to be sure its stable. Peak temp was 52C.

That is a really nice O/C

Keep the results and o/c attempts coming Then try upping the core voltage

Matthew

now y can't all coolers look that good

What a monster of a cooling. Nice temps though.

Managed to get it up to 756/1890/2000 Played Crysis and UT3 demos for a half hour or so and left ATItool scanning for artifacts for 15minutes with no errors. Peak temp was 51C this time; I think my room has cooled down a bit since I turned off the central heating.

Tried pushing the core up to 765 but started getting artifacts in ATITool after a few seconds. Not tried getting the memory over 1000, mainly because I got paranoid about the memory temps and kept touching the little heatsinks to see how hot they were. Ended up knocking two off and they're quite difficult to get back on without removing the main heatsink

Good job, good results too. Nice one

I've just installed the same thing on my 2900 pro the same way you have on your 8800gt - seems to get pretty hot - the heat pipes are so warm that you can't keep a finger on them for long :/

Thats without a fan on it though - i forgot to purchase a 92mm fan with it