How's that tape holding up with the heat? Most "cheap" double sided tapes I know would face some serious issues when going in the 50°C range and above and would just "drop" the fan.

Cheers!

I've used gel adhesive tape, it holds pretty well.
Also it never touched 50 degrees when i gave far cry a test, was around 47.

There are a lot of Gigabyte 8600GT/GTS 9600GT, GT240, HD4670, HD5670 and other cards that are dirt cheap and were shipped with Zalman VF700. You can look specifically for faulty ones for only the cooler. They cost something lik 1 or 2€ plus shipping.

For higher tier cards, you can look for something like the Gigabyte 8800GT, GTS250, HD4850 and HD4870 and similar cards for Zalman VF830 and VF1050 coolers.

All great coolers for retro/older graphics cards without the need of any sort of tinkering and get them for the price of a brand new Noctua fan.

Can't go wrong with Zalman ZM80D-HP

I prefer the Arctic Cooling NV Silencer 3.
Some years ago, there was a seller in Europe who had a lot of ATI & NV Silencers in stock for as little as $5 a piece. So I obviously bought quite a few back then.
Nowadays, they seem to be more rare and quite expensive (almost as expensive as some of the GPUs themselves, jeez).