Zalman VGA Cooler on 6600GT

I like the quiet life and I like my PC to be quiet. I have a Tagan TG480 PSU which is whisper quiet and 2x 120mm fans connected to a fan controller running at almost the lowest level, the only thing I can hear on my PC is the graphics card cooler so I did some research and found the Zalman cooler to be the best (and quietest) for the 6600GT and would also allow me to use it on the 7950GT I plan to buy in the future.

Here's the original and noisy cooler on the card:-

 

Notice the holes used for the original heatsink in yellow and the standard Nvidia holes marked in blue that are to be used for the Zalman Cooler.

 

 

 

All good so far, and after cleaning the GPU and then applying some Arctic Silver 5 compound (HIGHLY recommended) it was time to fit the Zalman cooler. Unfortunately as you can see the cooler does not fit properly! With the pins fully screwed into the cooler (black arrow) they now do not quite line up with the PCB holes (blue arrow). Moving the pins into the other holes on the cooler for other cards just made it worse, they were definitely in the right cooler holes but they wouldn't fit.

 

 

 

 A quick check on the web and I saw that a couple of other reviewers had had the same problem so here's the fix:-

 

Loosen the pins slightly so there is some play in them (black arrows) and the push them through the holes (blue arrows). Once through you can use some point nose pliers to tighten them back up again 'almost' all the way. They fit very tightly against the PCB after this!

After all this effort I found that the Zalman fan wasn't that quiet and I could still hear it so I used the included fan mate controller and slowed the fan down to it's slowest setting. I thought this would effect the temperature but I was wrong, I still acheived a drop from 53c to 40c and I could no longer hear the fan, mission accomplished!

 

Standard cooler at idle = 53c       Standard noise = Audible even in special sound proof case.

Zalman cooler at idle   = 40c         Zalman cooler = In-audible from around 30cms in the open at fans slowest speed.