Arctic Accelero Xtreme Plus II and XfX Radeon 6950 - i'm dying here

Ok, so this cooler is giving me alot of trouble. During the installation i noticed that using the 3mm spacers would place the cooler too high; not connecting to the chip, so i left them out. The plate which connects cooler to the card is sitting on framing of the chip anyways and not directly on the card, is this ok?

The top vram bank will have to do without heatsinks, there is no way that it'll fit under the cooler. But XfX apparently is not cooling them either, cause the stock cooler is leaving them out in the open, so i guess it's not going to be worse than before. Please tell me my card won't get angry at me.

Next up is the power connection. The cooler has 4 cables, blue, red, yellow and black which would fit on top of a 4 pin plug; and an additional set of cables coming from the "maincable"; red, yellow and black which ends up in a 3 pin plug. But here's the deal, my card only has 2 pins, the stock cooler comes with a red/black cable.

Now what i did is removing the plastic around the pins on the card, and connecting the 3 pin plug, so that red and black (just like the stock cooler) will get power. Is this ok, or will this give me trouble?
I noticed the cooler has an adapter to plug it directly in your psu instead of the gpu, and it has 12v and 7v endings, how do i have to set this up if i need to do this?

I'm kinda on the edge about pluggin this card in right now, especially the power connection is giving me a headache, frying my card is the last thing i need right now. Overall i'm kinda angry at Arctic, recommending this cooler for a 6950 is pretty far strechted.

Thanks for your help guys.

Red and black are power, yellow reports the RPM the fans running at, and blue is for PWM control. The fan should spin as long as red and black are connected.

Ok, so i guess that is working then. One more thing, you often find people talking about oddly placed vrams and them modifying heatsinks to make it fit.

The xfx though has two ram banks, which are obvious and the voltage block, which was covered by a heatsink already. The rest of the card had no heatsinks/thermal pads on them after removing the stock cooler, so i guess i'm fine if i covered the vram that was cooled before?

On the subject of the vram modules,

If the manufacturer did not apply any kind of cooling solution directly to these modules, then chances are you should be fine. If you are going to crank this card to the max, however, you could always pop a few of these on those vram modules if they will fit, ie. if you have more than 8mm of space. But given that this cooling unit sports 3 fans, you should have plenty of airflow wicking away some of the heat of the vram modules.

Thank you, that is reassuring. I guess i will give it another hour for the glue to dry and then give the card a spin.

Edit:

Ok, the card is installed and the fans are running. Being paranoid after all the installation trouble, i'm checking temperature in the catalyst tool. It's extremly hot today and the cards idle temperature is less than it was yesterday with the stock cooler, so that is nice.

However, every 30 seconds or so, both gpu and mem clock crank up close to the max, the cards gets a bit warmer and then they drop down again, the cards temperature immediately following. Should i be concerned about this, or is this a normal thing?

While I am not familiar with the 6950 directly, this behavior does sound normal. My 6870 does the same thing.

As your computer requires the video card to do work, the memory & gpu clock will dynamically increase. Kinda like the turboboost feature on some Intel processors. And of course, with any frequency increase + load = more heat, so it just comes with the territory.

To really test your card to make sure everything looks good, get a hold of a good GPU benchmarking program like 3DMark or Heaven. I currently use Furmark, but I'm in no position to reccomend benchmarking software for GPU's . At the very least, this will be able to show you how the cooler you purchased is performing with temps at full load. Goodluck!

Glue? OMG. You glues the heatsinks to the Vrams? Ever heard of Sekisui Thermal Tape?

I might have spelled it wrong and it seems to be dissapearing from EBay, where it was cheap and plentiful.

Might be too late. You got some sort of glue on them, hope it works.

Conumdrum said:

Glue? OMG. You glues the heatsinks to the Vrams? Ever heard of Sekisui Thermal Tape?

I might have spelled it wrong and it seems to be dissapearing from EBay, where it was cheap and plentiful.

Might be too late. You got some sort of glue on them, hope it works.

Click to expand...

Arctic Cooling included their own thermal glue with the heatsink, that's what most people use: http://www.arctic.ac/en/p/cooling/discontinued-products/thermal-compound/381/g-1.html?L=1&c=2291

Well that ain't right when better solutions are much better. Guess more stickies are needed.

I never knew any companies put that in the kit. Ack...........

Claims to have a higher thermal conductivity...Sekisui conductivity is 2.8 W/mK from their website, Arctic Cooling claims 4.3 W/mK.

http://www.sekisui.co.jp/minase/eng/led/knd/index.html

Well, it claims. Sekisui is removable and plenty cooling 'if done right'. Gotta clean chips right for glue or TTape anyhoo.