Disassembly

In the first step we removed the fan assembly which occupies the top most slot. You can clearly see the two fans which are controlled via a single fan output, which means that each fan's speed can not be optimized to its GPU's temperature.


After removal of the fan assembly you can see the two heatsink modules. Each one has two heatpipes and is dedicated to cool one RV770 graphics processor.


This metal plate came off the back and cools the eight memory chips on the back of the card.


After removal of the two heatsink modules you can see the two cores. Please note that Palit uses some sort of thermal epoxy on the cores. It took a lot of force to remove the heatsink modules. Also, it is almost impossible to clean up the hardened thermal compound if you don't have a good solvent cleaner. I used Arctic Silver Arctic Clean which worked like a charm.


The base of the cooler is made from copper to improve the heat transfer to the heatpipes and cooling fins.


As last step we removed this black metal plate from the front of the PCB. It cools the voltage regulation circuitry, the PCI-Express bridge chip and eight memory modules.