An Additional Mod On A GeForce 6800 LE

Not satisfied with modding a Thermalright SI-97 onto his GeForce 6800 LE, sbohdan further modded his GeForce 6800 LE! He felt that he should come up with even better cooling for the card's memory chips. The SI-97 mod would also cool the memory chips but he wanted something with a bigger bang, something that would match the SI-97 cooler in looks and possibly, further lower the memory chips' temperature.

So, he went to a used computer parts store and got himself an old Pentium CPU cooler for just $1. He cut it up with a saw so that he would end up with four small heatsinks. Then it was time to lap the new heatsinks.

He sanded the base of each heatsink with sandpaper, starting with grade 600, and then grade 800 before finishing off with grade 2000. He also kept tap water pouring on the based as he sanded it down.

After they were done, it was time to attach them to the memory chips. But he chose not to use Arctic Silver Thermal Adhesive because that would make it a permanent mod. He also did not want to use thermal pads since they were not as good at transferring heat as thermal paste. In the end, he turned to a home-made solution. Although it wasn't very professional, it was very effective in his opinion.

Since the new heatsinks would be covering the memory chips in pairs, he put Arctic Silver 5 on both memory chips. He covered almost the entire surface, leaving just a little part on opposing corners of each chip. In those spots, he put a little Crazy Glue (a cyanoacrylate glue). That was good enough to hold the new heatsinks in place and allow the use of Arctic Silver 5 thermal paste.

Here are pictures of the final mod!

As you can see, the heatsinks almost fill up all of the space below the SI-97. So, the Zalman fan cooling the SI-97 would also cool the heatsinks.

The new heatsinks are about 1.5X wider and 3X taller than the stock heatsinks. That gives them a lot more surface area for heat dissipation. Unfortunately, I had to remove the original little fan from the base, as it was interfering with the new memory heatsinks.

Here is what the modded GeForce 6800 LE looked like inside his case.

Please keep in mind that he has an 80mm fan blowing directly on the memory heatsinks and the SI-97 from the side of the case.

Improvements

He then checked to see how much further he could overclock the memory chips. Since his system was PSU-limited, he wasn't expecting much - running the memory chips cooler would at least make them more stable and increase their lifespan.

In the end, the mod allowed him to increase the memory clock by 30MHz DDR. So, his GeForce 6800 LE was now running at 444MHz core and 1130MHz memory. Final 3DMark05 score was 6055 3DMarks.

That was not much since his system was really limited by the PSU. But they now run much cooler and are a lot more stable. He actually stress-tested them with 3DMark05 running in a loop for 3.5 hours. He then played Quake 4 for 3 hours with no problem at all. It would be interesting to see just how much higher it could go with a more powerful PSU.