I don't think the card or a case fan move enough air for it to be any problem.

I did replace the blower cooler on my 6800 Ultra because of how noisy it was. One of those $5 eBay Chinese Zalman copies works well. Though the rather beefy RAM heat sink needed some modification for clearance. This card is almost inaudible.

Interesting. It looks like you cut the sink on the rear part in half, roughly, right?

obobskivich wrote:

Interesting. It looks like you cut the sink on the rear part in half, roughly, right?

Yeah it was too tall to fit with the new cooler. The RAM cooling on the 6800 Ultra seems a little overkill!

I wouldn't go hacking up something that isn't easy to replace, personally I prefer the real thing when it comes to coolers and the zalman vf900 is pretty compact. You can bend the fins a but and force the cooler down without doing any real damage as that is a cheap copy of the vf700 series. The all copper version is nice and had two of them but wish that I hadn't sold them.

I actually have two genuine Zalman VF-700s (the "hybrid" ones that are part copper), so then it's either down to replacing the RAM coolers or hacking the original cooler. However at this point I've just decided to go with another card for the build; I realized that the motherboard, CPU, etc that I've picked are all early 2003 parts, and I can keep everything happily in 2003 with a number of cards I have on hand (none of which have this concern about the cooler associated with them), so that's what I intend to do. I know it will decrease performance, but that's not an issue for the games I'm intending to play. Thanks for the feedback though - and I'll certainly revisit the 6800U at some point in the future (I'm imagining Socket 754 being in its future...).