Well, I pulled the trigger on an upgrade and bought a shiny new Gigabyte 7970 GHZ edition card, and while I hear the stock cooling is decent, I've already got one of Dwood's excellent brackets and a Kuhler 920 currently cooling my GTX 560 TI. The 560 is getting downgraded to it's stock heatsink and I'm going to re use the Dwood bracket (It has holes for both Nvidia and ATI cards).
The bracket has a 92mm fan on it which will blow air over the (really small) stock VRM heatsink that the 7970 has. So far I haven't come up with a solution for the ram.
Two questions:
How hot exactly do these VRMS get, especially with an over volt and an overclock? Is my 92mm fan with the stock vrm heatsink going to be adequate for the task?
How badly does the ram need cooling? I'm considering just letting it run bare, but I notice that all of the reference and aftermarket 7970 coolers have thermal pads for the ram. I could slap some Enzotech copper sinks on it as I have them from the 560 TI and I've got some Seiksui thermal tape handy, but I need to buy a second pack of them as I only have 8 sinks and this monster takes 12 sinks. From other posts I've seen that last sink near the PCIE slot isn't going to fit with the bracket from Dwood though, so at best there would be an unsinked ram chip in the place with the least airflow of all.
Advice would be appreciated.
The bracket has a 92mm fan on it which will blow air over the (really small) stock VRM heatsink that the 7970 has. So far I haven't come up with a solution for the ram.
Two questions:
How hot exactly do these VRMS get, especially with an over volt and an overclock? Is my 92mm fan with the stock vrm heatsink going to be adequate for the task?
How badly does the ram need cooling? I'm considering just letting it run bare, but I notice that all of the reference and aftermarket 7970 coolers have thermal pads for the ram. I could slap some Enzotech copper sinks on it as I have them from the 560 TI and I've got some Seiksui thermal tape handy, but I need to buy a second pack of them as I only have 8 sinks and this monster takes 12 sinks. From other posts I've seen that last sink near the PCIE slot isn't going to fit with the bracket from Dwood though, so at best there would be an unsinked ram chip in the place with the least airflow of all.
Advice would be appreciated.
