Flower Heatsink

Your first impression is probably the same as mine. The VF700-AlCu is basically a CNPS7x00 cooler with the 3/4th of the lower fins chopped off! Well, the reason is pretty obvious. The chopped-off fins allow the cooler to clear any tall motherboard capacitors around the AGP or PCI Express slot.

Heatsink	Top View

As the 'AlCu' model name suggests, this heatsink uses two different metals - aluminium and copper. The main reasons for using a mix of aluminium and copper, instead of full copper, are to keep both weight and price low. But due to the poorer thermal conductivity of aluminium, the performance of the AlCu model may not be as good as the full copper model.

The aluminium and copper fins are bolted permanently together using two 6 cm thick aluminium blocks on each side.

Heatsink Disassembled

As shown in the picture above, the fan doesn't mount directly onto the heatsink. Instead, the fan mounts onto a metal frame, which is itself attached to the heatsink via four screws on both sides. This prevents the heatsink from being damaged by screw threads. The same metal frame also prevents the clip from moving about.

Side View

The heatsink base was polished to almost a mirror finish, providing the best possible contact possible with the GPU.

Back View

The centre of the base was slightly raised to clear the shim on certain GPUs like the ATI's R3x0/R4xx series as well as NVIDIA's GeForce 6800 series.