Plz make sure you respect the curing time. If you start to soon to mount the cooler some parts will get displaced or even will fall off. The finished GTX480 got a nice overhaul, time to see how she performs.

Space is really limited, so it's a tight fit. Hardest part is to decently hide the fan power supply cable :p

When screwing down the heatsink make sure you don't warp the PCB. I intentionally used the wrong spacers (Two different versions in the box) and slowly tightened down the 4 screws. The PCB seriously warped as can be seen in the two below pictures.

For the test setup we used the following parts :

ASUS Rampage 3 Extreme
Intel 990X Gulftown @4Ghz watercooled
Corsair 6Gb Dominator PC12800C8 rams
Corsair HX1000 Power supply
Lian Li PC08B Case

First we test the GTX480 at stock speeds : 700 GPU core and 1848Mhz ram speeds. Second test is with the GTX480 overclocked at 850Mhz and the rams at 2100Mhz. To remain stable we had to up the GPU voltages to 1125mV.

At first we let the card idle for about 15 mins and monitored the GPU and PCB temps in GPU-Z. The temps are easy to monitor, as you can select during testing the min, max, average and current temp readout in the GPU-Z sensor tab. For the load test MSI Kombustor was our favourite torture test. We ran GPU Burn in at 1280 x 1024 DX11 resolution (max of our 24" monitor). This during a period of 15 mins. This seems more than long enough as this Furmark based test heats up the card more than most games ever would.

Time to turn the page for the results of the Madshrimps jury :