Project 620: Cooling The Ultra

The heatsink I used on the Viper V770 Ultra was the Global Win CPM25603-12 (which will be renamed the CPM25603-32 soon). This is really a socket 370 heatsink designed to cool overclocked PPGA Celerons (it does a really good job doing that too). The whole unit is 2 inches tall. The TennMax Lasagna cooler looks like a peon next to it. The 1 inch tall fan blows 26 CFM of air onto the 1 inch tall heatsink. You will say good bye to 2 PCI slots and hello to what could be the most powerful video card cooler in the world.

I use 2 Zip Ties to strap the heatsink onto the Viper. If you look at the outer corners of the heatsink on the above pics you can see how the Zip Ties wrap around the card. Using the Zip Ties allowed positive pressure mounting of the heatsink and the use of heatsink compound between the TNT2 chip and the heatsink.

The cost of the cooler is only $13.60 US ($19.99 Canadian) from AMK Services. This is a great deal when you consider that TennMax sells their tiny Lasagna Coolers for $17 to $27 and it doesn't perform anywhere near as good or create that jaw dropping effect when your friends look at it. :-)

If you look closely at the above photo you will notice some metal strips on the memory chips. Those metal strips are normally used to cover up PCI slots. They help remove heat off the memory chips. There are 2 strips on each side of the card (the Viper has memory chips on both side), held in place by Zip Ties and heatsink compound.

After installing the Viper back into the system, I mounted The Card Cooler to further help cool the card down. While the card cooler doesn't allow me to overclocked the core speed any higher, it does allow the increasing of memory speed.

The Card Cooler does a great job of removing the heat that the PCI strips removed off the memory chips. Another benefit is that those fans are powerful enough that they actually help lower the temp of the entire case. The only downside to the Card Cooler is that is blocks off the view to the huge Global Win cooler.

The bottom line from this crazy setup is a Viper V770 Ultra that runs rock stable at 185Mhz core and 243Mhz memory!

To overclock the card I use a program call TNTCLK. It's very small and easy to use. Just set the speed you want and forget about it.

Next Page: Case Cooling 101