I have a cousin who just bought a brand-new high-end laptop, and wanted me to copy her data from her "old" tower to her laptop. Spent a few hours copying about 5 gigs' worth of MP3's and high-res digital cam pics (silly me, I thought I'd be done in an hour, tops, whatever happened to copying over My Documents, Favorites, a .PST file or two or Outlook Express .WAB and mail store, and being done with it?!). I asked what she was going to do with the PC and she asked if she should throw it out? I said "Nah, don't toss it, I'll take it off your hands". How nice of me, eh?

Well, the PC actually has some pretty decent hardware in it. An Asus P4PE-X mobo which supports 800FSB hyperthreading P4's over 3 GHz, DDR266/333/400 RAM, currently sporting a 533 FSB 2.4 GHz P4 and 512M of crappy no-name RAM, WD 60 gig HDD, 24X CD-RW, 52X CD, floppy, SB Live!, and a rip-roarin' ATI Rage 128. Makes you wonder wtf some of those system builders are thinking, eh? I mean, the mobo has onboard audio, so why slap in an SB Live! card for just an internet/home office box? Weird...

Anyway, on to my story. My bro' has been wanting a computer for years now, but never had the money for his own. And I barely have enough to keep myself up-to-date with the Joneses (of last year), so I never had something for him that was powerful enough (he loves games so I'm not gonna waste both of our times with a 466 MHz Celeron). But since I got a decent barebones platform that should overclock nicely, I sprung for some hardware: An XFX GeForce 7600GT, 1 gig of Mushkin PC3200 CL3-3-3-8 RAM, Zalman Ultra-Quiet CNPS 7000B-AlCu LED cooler to swap out the OEM Intel job, and a premodded case w/window (I only have about 5 days to put this together, including wiping the previous O/S and installing a ton of games, so I don't have time for much customizing, but he'll crap his pants nonetheless when he sees it).

I'm putting the 7600GT in Project μ-Blaze and giving my brother the BFG 6600GT OC that I put in there originally. After looking closely at the heatsink that XFX put on their version of the 7600GT, I decided changes had to be made. It has a black anodized aluminum heatsink with an ugly sticker on it and a square copper core. The core is about the size of a postage stamp. It can't be too thick either. The fan isn't even located above the core, but ahead of it, I guess their idea was that it'd blow across the heatsink directly over the GPU eventually. Not a great logistical design. That BFG 'sink just looked so much better, with it's heavy copper GPU 'sink and "copper" secondary 'sink.

So I decided to swap heatsinks and make a hybrid. The XFX card has a black-painted PCB with black aluminum primary & secondary heatsinks and ugly sticker. I took the copper main heatsink that I'd already lapped off the BFG, and took off the secondary "copper" heatsink and decided to lap it, too. That's when I found out that BFG uses aluminum secondary 'sinks that are only copper-COLORED. Haha! Oh well...it was still better than the XFX secondary, more surface area and looked better.

I'll put the XFX stuff on the 6600GT going to my bro. Here's a few pics of this little videocard hybrid-mod. She's a little beauty, eh?

P.S. Here's a tip for someone who gets frustrated trying to squeeze in those plastic barbs on the posts that hold most vidcard heatsinks in place, and are paranoid about slipping with the ol' needlenose and scoring some new traces on their PCB--or knocking off a diode or two: You know those metal tools you get when you buy a wire sleeving kit? The one that has a circular hole at one end that slides over and pushes in the Molex pins' metal barbs? That works almost perfectly for compressing those plastic vidcard heatsink barbs, too! It's a tight fit, but I found it worked quite well when I pushed the post in from the vidcard side, while pressing on the Molex tool while rotating it back and forth, until it slipped over the barbs completely...then I just had to give a little tug from the post-side, and out they came!

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