HD2900 with Thermalright HR-03 R600 edition

As some of you know I am anal about my noise levels, and even though this hd2900 pro is a fun card...I couldn't stand the noise levels of that stock heatsink.

So today my Thermalright HR-03 R600 arrived, and after a little while wresting with the damn thing its finally installed and paired with an Antec Tri-cool 92mm fan, its variable RPM with the included switch, from 1200, 1600, and 2200 rpm (21-28-38 cfm) so it pushes a good bit of air and keeps my noise levels down.

So heres some pictures for you guys to look at while I stress test this beastly heatsink:

picture 1
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picture 3

Images are a bit big so I'll link em instead of posting the shots.

Installation took a good half hour, having a helping hand really would have helped speed things up as these are heavy components and then trying to wiggle the whole thing into my case without having it touch my water tubing took some time. Its worth noting that anyone else with the Lian Li PCA-16 case will have to lower the side mounted 120mm fan as its stock position is blocked by the heatpipes of the HD-03.

It looks bad ass, it's inaudible over my other fans (low rpm 120mm), and we'll see how it holds up to some overclocking and 3dmark looping

Dam Stang, that is one heck of a heatsink!

Love the way your case looks. Nice and clean

Let's see some benches!!

nice cooler there. i would consider it for my pro's, but the space needed for two would put me off. I agree with the stock cooling noise. 37.5% is more than enough to get to annoying level. No matter any further. Have to tell me how it turns out on those cards. these two seem capable on stock coolers of 850mhz core. 1025mhz mem.

- Paul

I'm not holding my breath for overclocking results, prior to dropping this heatsink on I topped out 700/900 24/7 stable, benched as high as 800/900 but would crash after more than a single run. Temps used to be hitting 80c without any effort, highest I ever saw was 89c overclocked, but I'm sure its seen higher temps without me knowing lol. Texas heat is not friendly to computers, nevermind ones that run hot already

But with the new heatsink I am looking towards 850/950 stable for looping but it did crash 3dmark06 on the firefly test, though the crysis gpu benchmark finishes every loop just fine. Maybe the paste just needs a bit more time to set properly. Id say 800/900 is gunna be my new 24/7 setting, if not higher.
Temps seem to be idling about 42c and after looping crysis gpu test twice I only ever hit 60c. Considering the HUGE drop in noise levels with this cooler, even if my card can't hit any higher clocks I am happy with the investment.

And thanks for noticing my case brian, I spent a fair bit of time on it when I put it together, but I'm still not done. I still have to solder my new SATA cables, damn things dont come in anything shorter than 10in and my SATA ports are 2in from the damn drives. Once those are finished I'll have to re-route some of my fan cables cause this new 92mm fan took the header off my hard drive fan, and because the damn cooler is so big on this video card I had to untie my rear fan cause it was touching the heatpipe, and I was worried it may melt the wire But I still need to remove the gpu block from my water loop, it hasn't been used since I ran my 7900GT/GTX cause it wont fit the 8800s or hd2900s...and even if it did my passsive loop would probably not handle that kinda heat

*edit*
Also, I should mention my card uses Hynix 1.1ns GDDR3 modules, not the Samsung 1ns modules that some HIS cards use, nor the 1ns Hynix modules the XTs usually see, so these things being rated for 910mhz reaching 1ghz would be a bit of a stretch, but 950 hasnt slowed me down, and 950mhz yields a nice 121.6gb of memory bandwidth And also I am unsure of my core revision as my gpu die wasn't labeled at all, as you can see here So I dont think I've been too lucky with this 2900 pro

well since my overclocking stang, i have realised that they don;t get nowhere near where i said stable. 850mhz works on everything i have tried but 3dmark06 and the whiteout techdemo. Also as a note, check this out.

When set to 800mhz on the cores, atitool shows no artifacts or high any yellow areas. However if you go into whiteout tech demo, you can clearly see artifacts when it shows ruby. This happens in both crossfire and not. When trying 850, 3dmark06 will go as far as the first test on SM3.0, and will crash at random points. Whiteout goes in a matter of a few seconds!

By al means, for 24/7 use, these are gona be run stock, but i think the raw stable core clock is somewhere between 740 and 800.Seems as if something on the r600 core itself is going much earlier than the rest of the core, and it takes certain extreme conditions to highlight this. Maybe you could test it and see if you get the same results.

- Paul

You're anal about a lot more than just noise

Now you just need to get rid of that POS zalman reserator loop...