To overclock the Annihilator Pro, I used
Powerstrip by EnTech (available at the
download page). Powerstrip
allows you to overclock the Pro as high as 200Mhz core and 400Mhz memory if
you're crazy enough. The Annihilator can be overclocked to 142Mhz core and
335Mhz on the RAM without the aid of any aftermarket cooling devices. To get the
most out of the card, I pop the stock heatsink off and lapped the core of the
GPU flat. Then I attached a heatsink from an old K6 CPU onto it. The sink is
cooled by a 50mm Global Win fan that moves about 11 CFM of air. The DDR RAM were
cool by RAM Sinks from the
Mellenger
Video Card Cooling Kit. Everything is held together by double side thermal
tape. You will lose one PCI slot with this setup.
The stock heatsink is held to the GPU by
glue. You will need a butter knife to pop it off. A printer's ink knife is idea
as it fits in there perfectly. Once the stock cooler is removed you have to
clean off all the remaining glue. All I can say is it sure is easier to remove
the heatsink off the Asus GeForce cards! No glue to deal with.
While lapping the GPU does make it nice and
shiny, I doubt it really allowed me to overclock higher than no lapping. The GPU
is pretty flat to begin with. The Mellenger RAM heatsinks were a new designed
for DDR RAM. They do a better job of completely covering each RAM module.
Normally I would have used the GPU heatsink supplied with the Mellenger Video
Card Cooling Kit but Mellenger had sold out of them at the time, so I had to
come up with my own solution. My feeling is the Mellenger heatsink is higher
performing than my K6 heatsink because it's bigger.
To make sure everything stay nice and cool, I
added The Card
Cooler. This is a great device. You mount it over your video card and it
blows air from two high power 3" case fans on to the video card, cooling both
the GPU and RAM heatsinks. Using this setup I was able to get the Annihilator
Pro running stable at 160Mhz core and 360Mhz memory. Not too bad. Anything above
160/360 produced visual side effects.
Next page: Overclock benchmarks & rating
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