Thermaltake Extreme Giant III

The basic concept of the Giant III is the same as the Giant II.  An aluminum block is mounted to either side of the GPU.  This is done by a bracket on each of the blocks.  These brackets are attached to one another through the mounting holes in the card's PCB.  Below, you can see that the mounting arms can swing out to reach the placement of most any mounting hole position.  This design is what gives the Giant III its almost universal applicability.  To confirm this, we also installed the Giant III on a GeForce FX 5700 Ultra and had no difficulty.

The receiving nuts have screw tips on one end to allow for the mounting of the cooling block on the reverse side of your card.

Eight copper RAM sinks were included with the Giant III kit.  These were of the rectangular design for standard type memory.  Cards with BGA memory chips should be able to handle them also depending on how crowded the card in question is.  On our 9600 XT they fit like a glove.  They attach via preinstalled double sided tape to their base that proved very effective. 

Following the mounting of the cooling blocks, two nickel plated copper heat pipes are installed.   These are designed so that they run from cooling block to cooling block lengthwise around the card as you see below.  This transfers heat from one side of the card to the other taking full advantage of the convection fins of the aluminum 'sandwich' pieces we have yet to install.  The Giant III kit came with a large tube of silicone thermal grease.  All the metal on metal parts we are attaching here are requiring a thin coating of goo during assembly.  You can see the white of the paste in the pic below.

Installation of the larger cooling sides was straight forward.  Four small screws hold each side to its respective cooling block.  The large holes you see under the 60mm fan area are to increase air flow over the card's PCB, specifically the memory.  The next two pics are of the fans installed.  The 60x60x10mm as we noted before is a three speed manual adjustable number.  On the top of the card is where the squirrel cage fan mounts.  It is positioned so that the air flow it generates blows on each side of the card.   

Here is the final product.  The Giant III is just that, GIANT!

The fan control on a slot bracket was not neglected of Tt's attention.  A reasonably clean design with a blue wire sleeve covering the lines that connect it to the power supply.  This sleeving is clearly influenced by that of the Tt Butterfly PSU and the Tt Purepower 560w PSU.  The three position switch and especially the off/on button for the secondary fan was a nice thing to see on a slot bracket. 

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Page 1 - Introduction
Page 2 - The unit
Page 3 - Performance and Conclusion