Edward, I also have the MSI 6600GT AGP card and i find that the little heatsink beside the big heatsink ( i believe the bridge) is hotter than the big heatsink at IDLE and LOAD, but its just slightly hotter than warm i can lay my finger on it without pain. And i have delicate fingers, just to let you know

Does the VM-101 cover the bridge as well?? From the picture's i've seen it seem to only cover the CORE area not the bridge. Also, i accidently took the heatsink once and i found that there were 4 smaller DIE (or wutever u call it) is around the core, will the VM-101 cover them aswell?

Lastly, in your opinion, would the VM-101 perform better than the zalman 80D (no fan) in a unmodded Sonata (stock airflow, i guess).

Thx

Right, you can barely see in the pics that the VM-101 only covers the core, but leaves room so that the stock bridge heatsink can stay. As for the four squares, those are the memories, and they are not cooled by the VM-101. They shouldn't have to be, though: several other 6600GT's, including Gigabyte's overclocked passive card, leave the memory bare without a heatsink.

I'll let Ed answer your other questions to him.

i see, it seems that the STOCK heatsink fan is PRETTY efficent... half life 2-ed for over 3 hours the heatsink is barely warm only setback is itS LOUD

anyway, so basically the vm-101 would be a good choice interms of fanless gpu cooler

I picked VM-101 because the design appears, at least to me, to have far more surface area than the ZM80D-HP. I haven't tested them against each other so I cannot provide a concrete answer, but at least you can understand my reasoning for guessing that the VM-101 performs better between the two.

-Ed

Judging by the fact that A) the stock cooler barely does anything, since the thermal pads trying to transfer heat to the sinks from them is about 1.0mm thick and not tightly compressed, and B) I'm able to o/c my memory to 1075MHz with no sinks on them whatsoever, I'd say that the memory is perfectly happy unsinked.

-Ed

Thanks for the reply, I've made up my mind to go with the VM-101 for 2 reasons. 1) the Zalamn 80D-HP is heck alot of work to install (took my friend an hour) and i like the VM-101 apperance and performance wise.

THx

I can make no guarantees that VM-101 will install much quicker, and I do admit that the assembly itself isn't as secure as ZM80x-HP's.

-Ed

I highly prefer the VM-101 over any of Zalman's heatpipe coolers.

For one, my 6600GT died shortly after installing the Zalman (although others have done it successfully here.) The video card may have been bad - I didn't have much experience with it before the installation.

The VM-101 is much easier to install and requires very little thermal interface material. The dual heatpipe Zalman requires quite a bit, and can get messy. It took me a long time just to clean the Zalman after uninstalling it.

The assembly of the VM-101 is very secure. There does seem to be more leverage to physically push the heatsink fins and crack the GPU core if you really wanted to.

Granted it's secure enough that I'm still using it, right?

But I still feel the ZM80x-HP, which uses blocks on both sides is more secure.

-Ed

My friend has a ZM80D-HP so I'm going to get the VM-101 . If Edward is using it, im pretty confident in it though like Ed said, i might break it O_O but o well, whats life without risks...

edit: the VM-101 is better performance wise right? Cause i have to travel to tigerdirect to get the aerocool.

As I said in the other thread, I've never used or compared a ZM80x-HP against VM-101, so I can't make any statements with certainty; I simply guessed it would based upon the noticeable difference in surface area between the two sinks. The last time I used a Zalman graphics cooler, it was the single-pipe ZM80A-HP on a Radeon 9500 nonPro 128 L-mem that was softmodded, flashed and o/c'd into a 9700 Pro.

-Ed

It seems that the VM-101 is out of stock @ tigerdirect.ca

From SometimesWarriors post about modding the 6600gt, i got a similar plan myself but dont know if it will actually work out.

I plan to unplug/remove teh stock fan fromthe heatsinks and place a 120mm vantec stealth (yes i noe, its crap, but thats the only spare fan i have) on the side of the video card, but i have a couple concerns doing that.

Will there even be airflow to the heatsink?
Will the fan be enough to cool the heatsink (say at low rpm, unmodded Sonata)?
Where should i place the fan to optimize cooling performance?
Is this recommended?

Of course i will be getting the vm-101 but this is just a temporary alternative because the msi is just so damn loud. It could be my room but when i sleep, the noise is like banging on my head keeping me awake so i have to cover it with music.

Could this possibly dissipate enough heat to cool a 6800? My NV5 is too loud an annoying, and I'm thinking this might be a viable alternative, if it can actually cool it efficiently enough

It should. 6800 uses less power than 6600gt, therefore less heat. http://forums.silentpcreview.com/viewtopic.php?t=18945

Thanks, that helps. I hadn't seen that chart before. The Aerocool claims the ability to dissipate more than 70W of heat, so I should be fine.

Personally, I like this cooler better than the Zalman ZM-80DHP simply because of its light weight. Compare the VM-101's weight of 220g to Zalman's weight of 330g. That's a 50% difference!

Now if I didn't have an inverted motherboard, I'd be all over this!

OK, question for Ed,

As I have no access to an AGP MSI 6600, I have to choose between two alternatives. As I've grown accustomed to passive cooling, I'll have to go with Aerocool (I don't like heatpipes going around the back, so Zalmans are out). Since you've had hand-on experience, do you think I'll have any problems with any of the below cards? (Pics from Turkish hardware review site DarkHardware.com)

#1 Leadtek/Winfast




#2 Palit


The Leadtek one is the one I prefer as it overclocks better and has a thermal sensor built in. What I'm concerned about is the AGP bridge heatsink interference and the GPU looks a bit too high. The aerocool "arms" look flexible so the positioning shouldn't be a problem, right?

Finally got the pics right

The Leadtek one will be fine so long as you don't feel the need to use RAMsinks; RAMsinks are not happening with the way the arms are L-shaped for mounting the GPU block on VM-101. In fact, physically, it's the same layout as my MSi card.

I'm not using RAMsinks, obviously.

The Palit would also be fine so long as you don't mind pulling the heatsink farther away from the card so that the ends of the pipes have no way of intruding on the bridge chip's sink (assuming it's even high enough to interfere, which it probably isn't, if it's as low profile as the one on the Leadtek's bridge chip). Again, RAMsinks are out of the question.

-Ed

It was what I had...

I plan to do a fan swap anyway; take out the stock piece and swap in an orange one from Geeks.com.

-Ed

i've just ordered one of these (VM-101) for my Leadtek PCI-e 6600GT, and am hoping that i'll manage to make it avoid my XP-120.

Was just wondering, are there any opinions on whether one should use the thermal paste supplied with the VM-101, or use AS 5 or perhaps AS ceramique (i have both of the latter)?

I generally use Arctic Silver V on CPUs, GPUs and VPUs (like for my VM-101 on my 6600GT, and for the NV41 chip itself on my water cooled 6800GT), and then Ceramique on graphics memory and northbridge/southbridge/chipset chips (like for the BGA GDDR3 memory on my 6800GT; the block is a Danger Den NV-68, which covers the GPU as well as its memory).

I can't completely remember why I settled on this, though; I just know it's what I settled on.

-Ed

I've read at least two German reviews that clearly indicated the VM101 is considerably more efficient than the Zalmans. However, the former's main advantage seems to me to be weight. Especially with such a card as the AGP 6600, where the chip is mounted toward the upper part of the PCB. A Zalman might make the card too top-heavy and pose a serious threat to the AGP slot. Same for the Tt Fanless VGA, also better than the Zalman but heavier at 425 grams.

Ed, can you please tell me what is the span between the two heatsink mounting holes on your MSI PCB? I fear the distance between the two holes on the Leadtek may be too large for the mounting arms of the VM101.

my VM-101 came with 2 sets of arms, one small and one large. looked like it would be able to fit holes at any distance

Thanks, this is reassuring.

I started suddenly having serious problems with my AGP NX6600GT card. In "desktop mode it was fine, but the moment I tried ANYTHING 3D, it would fail. Major artifacts, stprites, games crashing, you name it. It did it even with DXDiag. It happened out of the blue.

SO... after what would be a very long story to tell (and coming pretty clsoe to an RMA), I came around to replacing the VM-101 I had installed on my card with the orignal stock fan.



And the problems are now gone!

What baffles me is that why it would start doing this all of a sudden when previously it had seemed to run stable and flawless

It leaves me to believe one of two things:

1) The VM-101 does not actually dissipate heat enough to work properly over the long haul. (I.e. wear and tear finally took it's toll? kind of odd...)

2) Possibly the VM-101 got bumped and was touching the heatpipes of the XP-90 (but I would think either this would short the system altogether or at least the video would not work!)

This is a mystery to me. I might do a little more investigation, but I'd like to know your thoughts.

Thanks!

I had previously mentioned that I felt the actual mounting of the unit isn't very (i.e. sufficiently) secure. If it was sliding out of position slowly over time, it might have gotten to a point where contact was poor, resulting in insufficient thermal transfer--or, it slid enough that the TIM you applied was no longer fully effective. This is far too difficult to arrive at a solid result for, though. Since the card works fine again with the stock cooler, I hesitate to believe that the chip has suffered extended duration heat damage (not impossible, just highly unlikely; if it were really slow heat damaged, no amount of cooling should fix it, in most cases).

Contact with the XP-90 shouldn't prove to be an issue, I believe. In fact, my VM-101 touches part of the case, which is grounded (or earthed, depending on where you're from), and that hasn't affected operation at all.

Perhaps if you get the time, try to investigate a bit more? I wonder if there's a possbility the pipes on your unit have a slow leak, thus reducing the effectiveness of the pipes over time (no more convection action)?

But how would one test for that?

-Ed

Whatever the issue, I am actually submitting an RMA on the card. After running with the stock fan for a bit, it started to fail again.

It could be unrelated, so we'll have to see. It's a good thing I didn't sell the stock fan!

THe good thing is, I actually had a X800XT lying around. I'm in the process of selling pulled parts from someone else's gaming system. I had to put the VM-101 so it sticks of it pretty far to avoid the XP-90, but it actually runs really well with the fanless solution!

In that case, it looks like the card either A) was defective to start with, but got worse over time or B) really did suffer heat damage.

Didn't want to possibly hijack the current direction of this thread, so I put the description of how I made a nicely secure mounting for the VM-101 here.