Aftermarket Cooler Installation & Performance

Please note that aftermarket cooler installation will void your warranty. We are showing this for information purposes only and are not responsible for any damage done to your video card during the process of installing an aftermarket heatsink.

While the stock cooler is more than up to the task of cooling down the 9800GTX’s core, we were curious to see what kind of performance a good aftermarket cooler would give us. Since the 9800GTX is based off the same G92 core as the 8800GT and 8800GTS 512MB we thought it was safe to assume that any cooler compatible with the GTX’s siblings would work with it as well. There were some worries that the retention holes around the core would not be the same due to the move to a larger PCB but we broke out our trusty Thermalright HR-03 GT just to be sure.


After removing the stock heatsink and cleaning the loads of thermal compound Nvidia applied to the core the next step is to clean off the ram and VRM chips. Thermalright’s HR-03 GT comes with more than enough heatsinks for both the VRM and ram modules on the GTX so their exact placement is up to you. Just remember to use a heatsink wherever Nvidia has applied thermal pads on their stock heatsink since these are the areas which generate the most heat and need additional cooling.


SUCCESS!! The holes on the 9800GTX lined up perfectly with the retention bracket of Thermalright’s cooler without any problems at all. This leads us to believe that any cooler which is advertised to be compatible with the 8800GT and 8800GTS 512MB can be used on this card without any installation problems. This means owners of the Coolink GFXChilla, Arctic Cooling’s S2 Rev.2, Thermaltake DuOrb and other coolers will be able to reuse their products on the new GTX. However, please make sure you remember that some coolers which are compatible with these lower-end G92-based cards may not be up to the task of properly cooling the hotter-running 9800GTX.


Decked out in its black PCB, the 9800GTX looks simply badass with the Thermalright HR-03 GT installed. But, does it provide better cooling?


Thermalright HR-03 GT Performance Results

For this test we loaded the core of the 9800GTX with 3dMark06’s Batch-Size rendering test at the highest triangle count with a resolution of 1600x1200 and 2xAA. This puts a constant high load on the core for the indicated time. All temperatures were recorded with nTune’s temperature logging program.

A 92mm Zalman ZM-F2 fan was installed which operates at approximately 1600PRM with the Quiet Mode adaptor attached. Arctic Cooling MX-2 thermal compound was applied as per manufacturer’s instructions.


Wow. What else is there to say? The HR-03 GT provides a 20°C reduction in heat over the stock cooler which is incredible to say the least. The only downside of this cooler is that it takes up a full three expansion slots in the configuration we used it in which will be far too much for anyone planning on a SLI setup.

Another benefit of this cooler (and this is a first for us and G92 cards) is that it provided us with more overclocking headroom.


Max Overclocks with HR-03 GT

Core: 851Mhz
Memory: 2448Mhz (DDR)


So there you have it; we were able to get an additional 44Mhz on the core while the memory overclock stayed the same as with the stock cooler. It seems that once we reached 851Mhz, the core was held back by voltage rather than temperatures since it would shut down almost immediately after starting 3DMark06. These overclocks were enough to push the 9800GTX slightly over the 16,000 mark in this benchmark which is quite impressive.