MODTHEBOX.COM - Canada's Premier Case Modding Source - Reviews - Thermaltake Giant II VGA Heat Pipe Cooler Review

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The Thermaltake Giant II VGA Heat Pipe Cooler Kit includes a universal clipping mechanism which allows this product to be used on any NVIDIA or ATI video card. This statement is partially true and is limited to specific sets of cards from each company. On the NVIDIA side, any TI or MX Series card will work perfectly fine while FX based cards might have a problem due to the location of the mount holes around the GPU. On the ATI side, any Radeon Series card will work provided that it also incorporates a set of fan mounting holes around the GPU. For this review, I will be using a MSI GF4 TI4200 video card. The MSI GF4 TI4200 includes a stock GPU cooler and I have included Cooler Master CRC-U01 copper heatsink chips on each of the ram modules. To start off this process requires the removal of the stock GPU cooler, which is secured to the PCB board via plastic clips.

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Once the stock GPU cooler was removed, the remainder of the previously applied thermal paste was wiped off and the GPU was cleaned with an isopropyl alcohol wipe. The Giant II VGA Heat Pipe Cooler Kit includes a small tube of Thermaltake's own thermal paste. As an alternative consumers can use other high performance thermal pastes from Artic Silver, Cooling Flow and Nanotherm. The only thing to keep in mind is that this kit uses an abundance of paste, so more than one tube of an alternative brand may be required to complete the setup. A thin layer of thermal paste is first applied to the GPU using a squeegee. The top GPU block is then placed on top of the GPU in order to mount the universal clipping mechanism.

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The clipping mechanism fits over the GPU heatsink base and uses two adjustable clamps to align itself with the fan mounting holes on the PCB of the video card. Once positioned properly, all that is required is to insert the appropriate mounting screw into each hole and secure it into place. The same process must be repeated for the reverse side of the video card. It is strongly recommended to note the orientation of the GPU blocks since installing these parts incorrectly will interfere with mounting the heat pipe. A thin layer of thermal paste must be applied to the top portion of the GPU heatsink as well as the main front aluminum heatsink which will sit on top of the video card.