I went to their support pages, sent a mail, still no response, will chase up. luckily enough a friend of mine who is an Uber nerd, went throu this drama before.
After I provided the comment by silverstone about orientation,
His thoughts were;
' powder, sintered or not, the heat pipe orientation for the windforce 670 is just wrong for the FT02. so the question is moot.
as far as heatpipe orientation for the 670GTX, the MSI twin frozer is the best choice. it has 5 heatpipes, out of which 4 of the heatpipes are actually useful. the heatpipe furthest away from the heat source is useless in a vertical mount but as silverstone said, the superior cooling power of the FT02/RV02 takes care of that shortcoming'
'Heatpipe orientation is a big consideration for cases like these, as is the wick of the heatpipe. Reference external exhaust vapor chamber coolers work most efficiently in these cases, but MSI coolers using powder metal wick heatpipes will be nearly as efficient because they are less dependent on gravity and should be quieter and cooler than the reference design because of the bigger, more effective coolers in many circumstances.
Asus directcu2
'generally speaking, the asus directCU2 is one of the best if not the best aftermarket coolers. UNFORTUNATELY, this is not true for FT02. FT02 works best when you have GPU cooler with fin's that are perpendicular to the AP181 fans. the directCU2 cooling fins are parallel to the AP181's. what makes the problem worse is the directCU2 heatpipes are vertical which means the cooling liquid inside all drain to the bottom of the pipe and makes the fundamental physics of heat heatpipe cooling useless.
Makes of cards
MSI twin frozer or HIS iceQ or sapphire X2 type card, then it'll work perfectly. but, directCU/accelero xtreme plus ii type cooler simply doesn't work as well in the FT02/RV02/FT03/RV03/TJ11 or any "stack cooling effect" type cases
I just recently bought a sapphire 7970 OC for my FT02. if you examine the cooler on it you will see the cooler has 5 heatpipes however 4 of the 5 heatpipes are VERY close to the heat source (where the thermal paste is) this means the liquid inside the heatpipe can be drawn up to the heat source easily through capillary action of the wick inside the heatpipe. the last heatpipe when mounted vertically is more then 2 inchs away from the heatsource so it's basically here for looks since it wont be dissipating any heat when mounting in a FT02, the last pipe is useless since liquid can not passively travel that far up a vertical pipe regardless of the type of wick you use.
On a Directcuii , you can see ALL of its heatpipes are vertical (when mounted on FT02) and reaches FAR below the heat source. this means there is no chance in hell any of the liquid will be making it back up to the heat source since it's way too much of a climb for the liquid with capillary action. this is the main reason why the directCU2/accelero xtreme plus II type cooler simply doesn't work in any kind of vertical mounting like the FT02 or any other case designed to have vertical mounting of GPU. i'm not saying your GPU will actually overheat with these coolers under stock clock, but if you are OCing, they are definitely not the ideal coolers to get. You'd be better of buying reference coolers and save a few £££'s
And thats his very very well versed opinion, and he does know his stuff.
Once, I hear back from Gigabyte, I'll post.
