Thermaltake Giant II VGA Cooler

Parts et al

From left to right below are the GPU heatsink base, heatsink base for the rear of the GPU and the clip sets that hold things down.  The base that will be in contact with the GPU was fair as far as a smooth finish goes.  Definitely room for improvement here.  Thermaltake has always put good attention on the lap job of their heatsinks.  It is surprising to not see that here.  The job is acceptable but some 1000 grit sandpaper and a piece of glass could get it much nicer. 

     

For the rest of the parts, I think it would be easiest to show you these as we look at how installation goes.  Typically we use Arctic Silver 3 around here for heatsink testing but as you will soon see you will need a lot of it.  With this in mind we took the cheap way out and went with the included silicon grease.

After greasing up the GPU, the heatsink base is placed on top.  This is held down with the clipping mechanism you see in the pic on the right.  Thermaltake advertises a universal mount.  We did not have an ATi card on hand to test this with but we did attempt an install with a GeForce FX and a GeForce 4 Ti.  The GeForce FX's mounting holes in the PCB were too close together preventing use of the included clipping mechanism.  Even after removing the "arms" of the clip it still would not fit on our Inno3D GeForce FX 5200.  We then had a go with the GeForce 4 Ti-4200 we had on the shelf.  Mounting went swimmingly.

     

The mounting screws seen holding the clip in the top right pic attach to a couple of mounts that receive the screw on one side and a threaded end on top.  This threaded top part allows the second heatsink base to be installed on the reverse side of the card.

  

Here is were things start getting fun.  The next step is the heatpipe.  The curved tube is nickel coated copper.  The theory behind this is that the heat pipe will conduct heat to the reverse side of the card to maximize the diffusion of thermal energy between the front and rear of the card.  Thermal goo is applied to the topside of the base and to the heatpipe where it will contact side one of the main heatsink plate.  Four screws are then employed to attach the main heatsink plate to the GPU base.  Next we flip the card over and repeat the process.

        

Lastly, the 45mm fan is screwed in place.  What we end up with is one big mamma-jamma.  Check it out.

     

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