I've ventured in the water cooling scenario with much intrepedation but have accomplished the task without too many bumps or bruises
I decided to buy the EXOS external cooler but opted for the Maze 3 and Radeon waterblock from DangerDen. He shipped them with 1/4" inlets and I must say that they are doing a fine job except.....
The ATI RADEON was poorly designed!. They have a copper shim around the GPU that doesn't make contact with the HSF, so they compensated by putting on thermal interface material....a big gob of it. No wonder the temps were hitting over 50C with the factory HSF!!!.
Well, when I placed the water block on it with some Arctic Silver II compound, the temps became worse; causing freezing and lock ups. When I removed the waterblock, that's when I noticed that it wasn't making contact.
So these are my options including what Dan had suggested:
1) sand down the shim
2) deep freeze the card to harden the glue and pry the shim off.
Now, I took a look at that shim and that sucker is on hard!. I need to know if anyone has been successful in removing it.
PS, I did a search and found a good article with pics describing the problem on the Radeon 9500 and the 9700's:
http://www.frostytech.com/articlevie...id=1288&page=1
Thanks and hello
Mark
