Not that it matters what the original heatsink was like as it's been replaced with an Akasa Freedom Force. This is ~90 x 200mm with 4 heatpipes that have "direct contact" to the GPU core.
The original Akasa fans have been discarded in favour of a pair of Arctic Cooling F9 PWM fans, hooked up to the cards fan header. The BIOS has been modified to give 25% minimum fan speed (down from 40%) and the temp curved tweaked. The VRMs have a cut-to-fit large black aluminium heatsink on them, this gets very hot but isn't a problem. The RAM chips have Enzotech ramsinks on them, cut down to fit under the cooler. The NVIO chip has a cut down northbridge heatsink on it.
The card has also had it's various power components "super glued" so there is pretty much no coil whine from it.
One fan speed cable is routed to the onboard header and fan speed is reported through the card, EG with GPU-Z and the other fan speed wire is loose and can be connected to motherboard etc for alternate fan speed monitoring.
The BIOS has the highest clocks I'm 100% confidant in flashed in to it but these could be changed. Currently 650/1476/1188MHz for Core/Shader/RAM, in this setup the card will and has run 24/7 with Folding@Home loading it to 100%.
So how well does it work? In my opinion, very! Under most conditions the fans stay at their minimum speed of 625rpm. They are good fans with very smooth noise and at this low speed very, very quiet. For scale they are quieter than most hard drives.
Under Folding@Home the GPU temp would be somewhere around 70°C, the fans don't speed up until ~72°C. It takes extreme load, like Furmark to get the fans to speed up and even if they do they do so gently and remain at very low noise level, typically <1000rpm.
Although GTX260 is bit of an old card now it's still very usefully powerful, in gaming somewhere around the HD5770 or GTS450. In Folding@Home its good for 8000~9000ppd. It also has quite reasonable idle power consumption although load is high for the performance on offer compared with newer cards.
This card with all it's aftermarket cooling is large, best thought of as a 4 slot solution, the card plus 3 more for the cooling, but it is really, truly, properly quiet
You'll get the card with heatsink fans etc, the original box and blower heatsink and the Akasa cooler box, PCIe power adapter and DVI-VGA converter.
To put it together was a lot of work and money, to buy the card, the cooler, the extra heatsinks and the replacement fans and I'm not sure what it's worth now but I'll start by asking £75 shipped.
The lot!
Large VRM heatsink:
Four direct touch heatpipes
NVIO etc heatsinks:
As it was installed in my PC:
http://www.eltonmaizemaze.co.uk/Jessica ... 1small.jpg
Any questions, additional info etc please ask.
Thanks, Seb
