I've been haunting the site for 4 or 5 months now and have found all kinds of wonderful stuff, even got caught up in the F@H craze. I had to dump my Volcano 7 and mod my power supply

Longwinded Summary:
I have an MSI GForce4 Ti 4200 64MB card. It's the loudest thing in my system and I deperately want to ditch the fan. I've tried unplugging the fan and running passive, but the sink gets almost too hot to touch. I don't think putting an L1A across it would work, since the sink has a piece of plastic on top, supposedly to force the air through the fins. Oh yeah, one of the mounting pins keeps slipping so every week or so I have to go in and reseat the dangling heatsink.

I've been considering the ZM80. Those giant heatsink and the heatpipe are pretty cool, but they're also big and heavy and every couple of weeks I hump this thing over to a buddy's house for some LAN'ing. I've also been looking at the ZM17 and the Alpha black micro-fin heatsinks (available at xoxide).

So, does a 4200 require a ZM80-level cooler, or will something smaller work? How good are the Alphas? Is passive acceptable or do I need a fan?

Oh, and thanks for all the advice I've already found and used!

IMO, the ZM80A is the minimum to get decent cooling, and even with that I have to use a little directed airflow on my Ti4200 to get good performance. Totally passive, in a low airflow case, the thing just doesn't get it done.

I lug my PC to my friend's house monthly for LAN party fun, and I have not had any problems (yet). I still think about it some, and I have considered just popping out the video card and carrying it with me to the party. Still, if the card breaks and dies, that's just another reason to get a new Radeon 9800 Well, that and if I happen to break the card tripping over a $500 bill.

id say if your current heatsink isnt working properly (ie its falling off) then your best bet is a zalman, if you can remedy the hs problem then id give it a go with a lia or nmb fan blowing accross the card (top and bottom from the side) i do and my hs runs cooler than before. my hs also had a cover (albeit metal) this could be unscrewed easily though, can yours? does it come away with the fan perhaps?

I've been told the ZM17 is plenty good with a L1A on a fan bracket, even for GF4600s by a couple of system integrators. They prefer it whenever possible to the ZM80 because the latter has so many interfaces which can be misaligned and cause heat transfer loss -- which is partly the conclusion of our own review on the ZM80. With the ZM17, to get the best cooling, if you have the room, just fan out the fins so they are farther apart for more effective radiation surface per cubic space of air.

I've removed the HS off my G4 4200 (the infamous "Golden Sample"), took the fan out of the also-too-noisy Thermaltake G4 cooler, and mounted the copper HS on the GPU with Arctic Silver 2. Due to the "dip" in the G4 GPU surface I had to use a lot more paste than I would on a CPU. Threw away the worthless push pin mounts and used thin machine screws to get decent pressure on the GPU. To isolate the nuts from the back of the vid card I cut "washers" out of the flat part of the silicone-rubber valve from a toddler's sippy cup (heat resistant and elastic). Mounted a 5-volted Panaflo 92mm L1A horizontally about 1/2" underneath the vid card. This does eat up 1 or 2 unused PCI slots, but it's silent.

Can we see a pic pwitty pwease

Just for the record, I too have used a ZM17 on an Albatron GeForce4 Ti4600 VIVO card for a year in one of my machines. I have an 80mm Antec sleeve-bearing fan mounted on a Zalman bracket, blowing down onto the ZM17, and running at 5V. Runs perfectly, and quietly.