Tweakmonster Rev. 4 "Standard" RAMsinks
& Thermaltake Crystal Orb

Companies: Tweakmonster / HeatsinkFactory
Products: Rev. 4 "Standard" RAMsinks / Thermaltake Crystal Orb
Street Price: 8 RAMsinks for ~$26 / Crystal Orb ~$13.99
Date Reviewed: May 6, 2002
Reviewed By: Vinny

Installation of New Cooling:

I used Arctic Alumina Epoxy to mount the RAMsinks and Arctic Silver II for the Crystal Orb. Installation was very simple for both the RAMsinks and the Crystal Orb. You can see below that these two items look as if they belong together.

The Crystal Orb mounted very easily with the provided push pins. They provide just enough tension to make sure the there is good contact between the cooler and the GPU. You should have no problem with any card that has standard mounting holes in it. One minor drawback to this cooler is that it takes up the PCI slot next to the AGP slot. Since that PCI slot usually shares an IRQ with the AGP slot there should not be anything put in that slot anyway so it shouldn't even be an issue. The other drawback is that it plugs into either a motherboard fan riser or a 4 pin molex connector instead of the power header on the video card. The reason this is an issue is because my ASUS temp monitoring software is flipping out telling me that my fan is not working.

The RAMsinks take a little longer than the Crystal Orb to install if you want to do it right. I did each RAMsink individually and gave the epoxy a few minutes to harden before I went on to the next one. This is to make sure that each RAMsink goes on straight and is an equal distance from the one beside of it. They fit on top of the chips perfectly and just a very thin layer of the epoxy on the RAMsink will bond nicely to the video card.

Overclocking:

Now that I have all this nice new cooling on my video card it is time to see what it can do. The ambient temperature for all of these tests was right on 24°C and remained stable throughout the testing.

I took temperatures from two different places on the card, one taped to the RAMsink right above the RAM and the other touching the top of the GPU. Temperatures were taken with a professional grade multi-meter / temperature probe.

Just FYI, standard speed for the GeForce3 Ti500 is 240MHzz Core / 500MHz RAM. Here is the first battery of tests at the cards stock speed:

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