It is ideal to retain the exsisting cooling fans for VRM's. If not then another fan should be used for cooling. There's quite a few chaps who were able to retain the stock shroud like cravenmild. For the record he wa my inspiration to tear into my 480's.

Also the main reason I attempted the mod was for silence. I couldn't stand the noise from two GTX 480's when gaming, etc. Now its near silent, so my objective was achieved.

I had started the NVIDIA group at the urge of another fellow modder. I can attest to the performance of such mod and have been using on three GTX 480's for close to a year. See here for my worklog: http://www.overclock.net/t/1140299/gtx-480-sli-antec-620s-mod/0_20 I had cracked off the IHS, lapped t...