However, after that we faced real difficulties. The thing is that before installing the heatpipes, you have to fill the semicircular gaps on the mounting surface with the thermal paste. During this operation you have to hold the graphics card vertically, otherwise the paste will get everywhere. We did our best, but it was real hard to prevent the paste from getting beyond these gaps. Luckily, it is very easy to clean off, as I have already mentioned above.

The heatsinks mounting appeared even more complicated. The mounting holes on the heatsink should coincide with the tiny mounting holes in the footing plates. This is when a magnetic screwdriver would help a lot, without it you will have really hard times. When the heatsinks have been mounted, the card looks as follows:

As you can see from the picture above, the memory chips are hidden under the heatsink, and in this case it would make completely no sense to try enhance their cooling by blowing a stream of air at the shorter side of the card, because the air stream coming from the fan on the system case side panel will be blocked by the heatsink. In fact, if you have this side case fan, you can improve the GPU cooling significantly. As for the memory, the GDDR3 working at the frequencies not exceeding 500MHz (1000MHz) should not be heating up that much, so you might be able to do without additional cooling here.

All in all, these construction peculiarities of the CL-G0003 do not make it an easy-to-install cooling device. In fact, Zalman ZM80C-HP also is not the easiest one to work with, but it seems to be the distinguishing feature of the enthusiastic solutions like that. By the way, the graphics card equipped with a CL-G0003 device doesn?t weigh that much at all, because its heatsink is made of aluminum. Some copper coolers, such as those used on Leadtek A400 graphics cards, for instance, weigh much more.