MSI 6600GT Heatsink Issues....Fixed! (Long)

[AntiTrust]

Hey guys....

I have been lurking for...well....a long time, so I finally decided to register and be a part of the community.

So I am in the process of building a new SLI machine after I recently sold my custom AGP rig for far more than it was worth. It has been a slow build over ther past two weeks or so, as the parts roll in from a few different vendors. I have parts from Newegg, Xoxide, SVC and ZipZoomFly sitting all over the house, much to the dismay of my wife, but oh well.

So the last part I needed to finally fire this thing up was the first of two video cards. I am using 2 MSI NX6600 GT's in SLI, and the first one came yesterday. I was like a kid on Christmas when the FedEx truck came, until I inspected the goods.

I don't have a picture of what I am about to describe, but the heatsink had separated from the ram on the far side of the card, and the whole sink was sort of pivoting over the GPU core if you touched the heatsink, even just a little. I was aware that other people had experienced similar issues with the MSI heatsink, but I wrongly thought it had been addressed by MSI. Bunch of savages....

So I was pissed...really pissed. I had already RMA's a few other bits of this machine, and I was finally going to get her fired up, until this crap. I was going to just say hell with it and RMA the card, but I would have had to wait another week to get the beast running.

WIth that in mind, I decided that no crappy heatsink was going to spoil my night, and I elected to find a way to fix it, no matter what. I took my motorcycle out for a spin, since 100mph always seems to have a therapeutic effect, and picked up some Arctic Silver, since I figured I would need some of that, and some high-temp 3M adhesive strips.

I got home and took off the heatsink, and found that MSI only bothered to cover about half of the RAM chips surface with thermal paste, although the core was covered pretty well. I guess the guy who made my card was drunk or something.

So I cleaned off all the offending half-assed thermal gunk, and applied my own layer of Silver, as well as put two small strips of double-stick in between the RAM chips on the far sides of the card. Make sure the adhesive isn't any taller than the ram, or the sink isn't going to touch anything except sticky. Once that was done, I put the sink back on, pressed it onto the adhesive strips, and voila....it stuck. Solid contact with the core and all of the RAM, and it doesn't budge a bit.

I guess sniper fire from a rooftop can wait, now that my video card is fixed.....phew.

Here are a few pics of the core, as well as where I put the double-stick, in case anyone needs to do this to their card.

Here is the card with no heatsink, after I removed all the thermal snot.

Here is a better pic of where I put the adhesive strips to secure the card. This is where the contact with the RAM was the weakest.

Here is the card installed in the case, you can see the adhesive, and how the heatsink is securely mated to the RAM. W00t!

Here is a shot of my desk while I was sleeving my new PSU....what a damn mess!