BEFORE

AFTER

As the graphics card comes from the box , there is a good chance that the heatsink was simply put on the GPU , and if your lucky , with some thermal compound . On cheaper cards you are unlikely to find ramsinks , now as long as overclocking is not on the agenda , things should be fine and dandy . But as always , there is most likely room for improvement . Using my GF2ti card as an example , taking the heatsink of the GPU I found two things , 1. The GPU was not flat , in fact  around 60% was not making contact with the heatsink , 2. The bottom of the heatsink was not very flat .

 The first thing I did was to use a metal file to file the bottom of the heatsink flat , and then use some fine Wet&Dry to polish out the file marks .

Next , using fine Wet & Dry paper , and a flat piece of plastic to wrap the wet and dry around , I polished the GPU flat .

The round silvery center was counter sunk and not making contact with the heatsink , since the hottest part was not making contact , were talking seriously reduced cooling.

After polishing with the Wet & Dry , the edges of the GPU had been polished away till they were flush with the nice shiny center , with a flat GPU , and a flat heatsink , there should be a serious improvement in cooling .

Next came the ramsinks , same deal , I used the file to flatten the bottoms , and some Wet & Dry to polish out the file marks . The ramsinks need to be glued on and there is nothing better for the job than Arctic Silver epoxy .

Now what you need to watch out for is , don't use too much epoxy , you just might short out your ram if the silver epoxy oozes out from under the ramsinks onto the connections coming out of the ram in all four directions ( see the above pic ) So use as little silver epoxy as you dare , or else you may kill your graphics card .

Now with all the work done , you can see just how cool the card looks , and it will hopefully run just as cool . It would be nice if the card came as it is now , but then the card would have cost more , labor for hand fitting is not cheap , not even in Taiwan anymore .  So the two hours I spent  filing and polishing is money saved , if you want to look at it that way , time to stop talking , and time to start overclocking .

Overclocking

When I reviewed this card , overclocking the ram 70mhz over the stock 400mhz caused artifacts to appear , and taking the core clock 55mhz over the stock core speed of 250mhz caused 3Dmark2001 to lock up . So lets see if the time and $12 spent on ramsinks was worth the effort. First things first , $12 on ramsinks , so are these things worth the effort , I took the ram up to 472mhz and ran 3Dmark2001 , there was still some minor artifacts showing up , about 70% less than before , so ok , the ramsinks seem to be doing there thing , but 70mhz over stock looks to be the max for this card and in reality keeping the ram around 50mhz over stock is a safer option . The 3dmark2001 score was 4244 3Dmarks for 250mhz core & 470mhz ram .

Time to take the core back up to 305mhz , ram is at 458mhz , no problem , no lock up this time in 3dmark2001 , the score was 4317 3Dmarks. Well the improvements may not be dramatic , but they are there never the less . In fact I must say Im more pleased with the results of sanding flat the GPU and heatsink , than I am with the ramsinks . 

Conclusion

Over all a worth while project , I was hoping for a little more with the ramsinks , but with the ram maxing out at 70mhz over stock ,  there isn't much to be done about it. Hand fitting the GPU and heatsink seems to have been a real winner , going from locking up to running just fine with the core at 305mhz . None of the results were negative , and over all the card is running cooler , which means that Im less likely to damage it from overclocking , all good . No harm no foul , so they say , should you do this with your vid card , hell yes , especially take a look at the GPU and heatsink fit , any improvement here will give you a longer lasting graphics card , and higher safe ocing levels .