| Thermalright V1 Ultra VGA Cooler
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Assembly:
Although not listed as a compatible card on the Thermalright site, for this review my intention was to make the V1 Ultra fit on a 128MB Gigabyte Radeon X600XT PCIe graphics card.
With the previous cooler removed, and the GPU core cleaned up, the first step to installing the Thermalright V1 Ultra is to mount the black bracket shown in the images below. The two through holes in the card's PCB are used to mount this device using four screws and two of the four black threaded tabs shown in the previous section. This arrangement may add a few steps to the installation, but it allows the cooler to be universally compatible with a handful of nVidia and ATI cards.
 
Tightening the screws squeezes the bracket against the rubber pad (see peeking out around the GPU core), and this stage of the installation seems quite secure. Although it is obviously intentional, the bending of the two tabs made me somehwat concerned.
The four holes seen at the corners of the black bracket are then used to secure the heatsink assembly. A thin smear of thermal paste was applied to the base of the cooler, and I did a "dry" run to see if the core would actually make contact with the cooler. It did, and a perfect imprint of the core was made into the thermal paste.
After the dry run, I applied a new coat of thermal paste on the base of the cooler and on the GPU core, and slid everything back into place. Four screws were then tightened in an alternating fashion to tighten everything up securely. The whole process was fairly easy, although some steps in the manual are not as clear as they could be, and people with less confidence in installing such a device might get lost.
The images below show a top and bottom view of the assembled cooler.
 
The images below provide a look under the cooler and the radiator to show that no features on the card interfered with the installation. Considering the Radeon X600XT was not on the compatible cards list, I was concerned that something like a capacitor might prevent the cooler from fitting.
 
Given the physical arrangement, of the eight memory chips found on this card, only five could be equipped with RAM sinks. Thermalright is aware that this will be a common issue on many cards, and includes a thermal pad for use on the memory concealed by the cooler. On the cooler side of the card, you are supposed to build up the thermal pad so that the memory is cooled directly by the GPU's cooler. On the radiator side, I am unsure what you are supposed to do.
 
I was not convinced of the effectiveness of the thermal pads on the memory chips that weren't able to be RAM sinked, so I left them oout of the installation. The inclusion of RAM sinks is definitely a nice bonus, and really makes the kit worth a bit more than a typical GPU cooler. The adhesive holds well, and the aluminum RAM sinks match the style of the V1 Ultra nicely.
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