Have any of you removed the heat sink protectors on your cards

Ok now I have a foxconn 8800 GTS 640 mb card that has this really annoying plastic cover over the heat sink. Can I remove that or is it there helping to lower my temperature's. Or is it the cause of my higher temperatures?

Stock cooler on the 8800GTS 640mb sucks in general. I have two of the EVGA branded ones. When I got them, they idled around 70c with the stock cooler. Changed to the Thermalright HR-03+ and they now idle closer to 45c.

As far as, is it helping, just from a theoretical point of view it would seem like that would hold the heat in some, so that build in fan could blow it out the back easier. Taking it off would just let the heat out in the case more, or at least thats the way it would seem to me..

Here is the low down as I see it.

jdf is inline on my thought about blowing the air out of the case. Which is the idea behind the shrouds. Here is the kicker though. The stock coolers just are not made to handle moving a lot of heat off the GPU core to the sink itself. Then use the shroud to push it out of the case. The heat efficiency removal is just .. Well sucky. There is actually a math formula to get this... Heat wattage efficiency.

Still with me on this?

Ok, now if you have a finer grade of heat removal...c/w for short. The core is going to have had, remove(d) much more heat energy to the heat sink itself.
Where you blow that dissipated heat is the design of the heatsink maker's concept. Thermalright does the.. You got good case flow. So no reason to use the exhaust out the back. Most others.. Give you. Your wanting the hotter dissipated air to get out of the case as easy/fast as you can.

That plastic shroud should act like a "wind tunnel" in a way, which keeps the flowing air over the HS. Removing it, may cause your temps to rise.

Why is it annoying, just asking? I would think it would help the low cfm fan on it to move the hot air out the back rather than in the case, but if you have good enough airflow in the case I do not see why you cannot remove them

Blower style fans need the shroud to direct the air flow through the HS fins. W/o the shroud your temps will be much worse as very little air would pass over the fins...unless you add another fan on top of the HS fins.


Quick question...Have you tried increasing the fan speed manually w/ a program like RivaTuner? It can make a world of difference. You can even tweak the BIOS for a more aggressive fan profile that will keep your core cooler w/o having to use any programs. It's a trade-off b/n cooling capacity and noise.

Badbonji said:

Why is it annoying, just asking? I would think it would help the low cfm fan on it to move the hot air out the back rather than in the case, but if you have good enough airflow in the case I do not see why you cannot remove them

Click to expand...

I cant clean the heat sink out of dust and deb-re that sometimes havoc a computer case. Plus I think its increasing my temps since I can not increase the fans speed do to the fact there is some kind of glitch related to NTune. Were I change one fan on the video card but the other stays same. So I am thinking just to remove the plastic since the air flow is extremely good in my case. MY CPU temps idle at 19c. With air flow alone. Unlike the Gpu temp which Idles in between. 42 and 48.

I removed it like the first poster said it was retaining heat. I droped like 10 degrees. So it definatly wasnt doing its job.

OMG, i just did the same thing to my 8800GT's, it REALLY helped because i have SLI on, it massively reduced my system temps and took off a few degrees on my cards