More on Installation

Unlike most of the video card coolers, the Thermo Coupler didn’t use retainer pins, thermal tape or thermal grease for attaching to the chip, but a piece of plastic that will be used as a base for the heatsink. This little thing hooked to the base of the chip, at first glance it seemed kinda strange but it was pretty stable after all and couldn’t be taken off easily.

After that I screwed the Thermo Coupler to the base, I stopped as soon as I felt the heatsink was making contact with the chip. Just make sure not to overtight it since that could damage the base and make your cooler unusable.

Finally I installed the video card in the AGP slot and turned the computer on. Although the Thermo Coupler isn’t too big compared to other cooling solutions, it’s big enough to make one of your PCI slots unusable, at least that’s in my Abit BH6.

What about the Software that came with the kit?

The first card I used for testing the kit was the V-3800 TNT2 card from ASUS, so I installed the software that came with the kit. Along with the tweaking utility, WinBench 99 benchmarking program was also installed, I didn’t use at all though.

My major complaint of this program was that it hasn’t got an option for overclocking the core and the memory of the card separately so overclocking the TNT2 core to 160mhz caused the memory to go up to 190mhz which definitely wasn’t good for the non-ultra TNT2 with 7ns memory.

So, the system hanged up for obvious reasons, that why I decided not to use this program, other than the overclocking sliders it has options for enabling/disabling V-Sync and some other options of that kind.

Also the game “optimizers” OverClk talks so much about (only available for Quake2, Unreal and AvP) what really do is to modify game settings in a graphical interface. This might be good for Quake 2 since its settings must be tweaked manually but after playing a bit with the utility I found it unusable, at least that’s for me.

For example in Unreal settings, the program for getting a boost didn’t use High detail textures and actors, as well as coronas. Of course, I can check them back and use them but then it would be the same not to use the program.

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