9800XT cooling

I need a little help from you guys being a nooby and this being the best place for advice. I'm trying to decide how to best cool this 9800XT if I decide to overclock it.

I took the stock hsf one off to see how it was installed. They had what looked like artic silver on the gpu and then thermal tape between the hsf and memory on the gpu side. On the back side it has "heat spreader" that covers the ram and some of the back side of the gpu. Between the heat spreader and the memory there's some small rubber squares that I assume has themal properties. I cleaned off the old grease and then put it back together using AS3 on the gpu and then left the rest the way it was.

I have 3 options on how to cool the card and the memory.


1. Leave the stock hsf on. The question I have with this is should I leave on the thermal tape and the pads on the back memory or use something else? I have some artic alumina adhesive but I'd rather not glue the device on in case I want to remove it later. Does one of the tubes of the adhesive function like artic alumina? Also it looks like I could easily mount some ramsinks onto the heat spreader. Do you think this would help?

2. I have a Zalman heat pipe and the optional fan. There's not much room on the back side for ramsinks to fit under, but I could buy some short ones and install them and then use regular ramsinks on the gpu side.

3. I have a Giant II heat pipe, which has more room for the ramsinks, but only a small fan blowing on the gpu. I do have a 60mm, 6,000 rpm, fan that I can mount ontop of the heat pipe for extra cooling or find a way to mount the Zalman 80mm fan.


I haven't had time to test the Zalman vs the Giant II, but I suspect that the Giant II would work better on the gpu as it has more surface area.

I'm pretty clueless on what to do so any advice would be very much appreciated.

Phil

The stock heatsink should be pretty good, anything better and you may condsider a cpu heatsink and some big ramsinks.

i think you could use the Zalman. it would be cool

Thanks for the advice. If I use the present hsf should I remove the thermal tape and pads and then use some artic alumina on the memory. If I use the Zalman are there some good low profile ramsinks to put on the ram. I looked up the memory its Hynix 400mhz ram. With the present configuration I can overclock it to 432/403 or 440/380 before it artifacts. I was hoping for more. Yeah Stan the Zalman is very cool

Well I put the Giant II on it. I used the paste that came with the heatpipe. Didn't want to get AS3 all over the card. I used thermal tape to apply the ramsinks, but they still had some alumina adhesive on them. I'll try and sand that off tomorrow. It got me up to 441/403. No help in the memory, but about 10 on the gpu.