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The easiest way to come up with the clean surface is to use sand, in this case, in form of a sandblaster (oops, not the average household item but where there is a will, there is someone who has access to something similar)

Sandblasting takes care of all the black crud and further provides a micro-porous surface for enhanced heat transfer.

Adding The fan

An old P2 fan fit the diameter of the cooler quite well and was glued on using E6000 (borrowed from my wife)

The fan shown here is not the one used for the final assembly, it is slighlty wider than the cooler. Another fan fit the diameter exactly and was glued on.

Lapping the bottom

To provide a perfect fit, the bottom of the assembled GPU-cooler was lapped by performing figure-8 movements on a piece of 150 sandpaper followed by a 200 grit. Afterwards the new cooler was glued to the RADEON GPU with Arctic Alumina Thermal Adhesive.

This is the final result of the modifications. The only problem encountered was that the onboard power supplied from the RADEON fan headers was not sufficient to really drive the GPU cooler fan. This was remedied by hooking up the fan directly to either the PSU or else to one of the mainboard fan headers.

Conclusion

The aim was to get at least a 12000 point score in 3DMark2001 at the 640 x 480 x 16 bpp setting. We are not talking about 3DMark 2000 but 2001. Did we make it? It wasn't really easy but we did it.

By quite a margin!

Was it really worth it? For about twice the amount of money or slightly more, you can get a blue ORB or similar device, without any hassles and similar performance. On the other hand, how exciting is it to buy something that everyone else can buy? To answer the first question, if you just want to get more performance the easiest way, it is not worth it. If you enjoy spending 1/2 hour in the garage (about the time it takes to build this puppy) and take pride in your own work, then definitely, go for it. The hardest part was really to figure out how to design the whole thing and what to use. And that part of the information is available here for free.

Don't forget a supply of bandaids and never work witout safety glasses.

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