Bought a NX6800, no copper cooler, got noisy black alu cooler

Question

So, I got a huuuge parcel in the mail and opened it up with much glee. I was however stumped when I gazed upon the card. :/
It has the black, noisy reference cooler and it really bummed me out. I emailed the store I bought it from, they were like meh, MSI changed the design, nothing we can do about it. I asked if they had cards with the copper cooler, they said no way josé.
So I checked the product info at the store, some other stores and MSI. None mentioned that the product may be different from the picture (all having pictures of the card sporting the classy copper), not even MSI. I've been an avid fan of MSI ever since, well, ever, but this is really left me feeling very disappointed. :(

Answer 1

I installed an Arctic Cooling NV silencer 5 on my MSI 6800 GT today, and thought I might share the experience here. I had read several threads about installing the NV silencer on 6800 vid cards, and tried to avoid the mistakes others had reported.
First taking off the stock cooling was rather simple. Unscrewing the 8 screws from back of the board lift off the fan compartment and memory heatsinks. This also revealed the memory heat transfer pads apparently glued to the memory heatsinks.
I think these probably don't conduct heat nearly as well as the modern thermal pastes, and actually one of the pads was positioned so, that it only covered half of one of the memory chips. Overall the impression of the quality of memory heatsink especially with these pads was poor. (of course it's the same with every card fitted with the reference cooler, not only MSI cards)
Next thing I unscrewed off the now visible GPU heatsink, made of aluminium, which had thermal paste of some sort too. After that I cleaned the thermal paste off the GPU, and the residues from the thermal pads off the memory chips too, using electronics precision cleaner (most likely isopropyl alcohol, though it doesn't say on the can).
At this time I got to finally see how the new NV silencer fits on the vid card. And indeed I was slightly surprised to see that the fan end didn't go down enough towards the board. Looking closer it was the plastic studs that held the little copper heatsink near the power socket, that prevented the NV silencer to get close enough to the board.
I wasn't sure why this was happening, reading other peoples articles about easy installation of the NV silencer. I then decided to remove the plastic studs from the heatsink, and wrapped a plastic cable tie around the copper heatsink and the whole vid card, now holding it in place.
It occured to me later that this copper heatsink must be remains of the MSI copper cooling solution. The green arrows in the pic point at the plastic studs that are too high from the vid card for NV silencer to fit perfectly - it didn't make contact to the memory chips until I removed the studs. (sorry, i borrowed the pic from hmdejong )
If you compare this picture to couple of the reference 6800 cards, you can indeed see that the reference cards don't have copper heatsink at this position, and also that the plastic studs holding the heatsink are level with the heatsink:
http://www.guru3d.com/admin/imageview.php?image=3295
http://www.firingsquad.com/media/hirez.asp?file=/hardware/pny_verto_6800gt/images/02.jpg
After fixing the problem with this heatsink, and seeing that the NV silencer now fits correctly, I applied Arctic Silver 5 on GPU and the memory chips. Reading that people have experienced poor temperature performance, I did apply more than the usual amount of thermal paste here, making sure that the new heatsink contacts the GPU and memory chips.
I screwed the silencer quite carefully on the board, reading about breaking screws, and checked against light that there are no gaps between memory chips, GPU and the heatsink. It seemed to sit fine on the vid card, so I tossed it in the computer.
First impressions were good, it was much quieter than the reference fan, idle temperatures came down from 57(core)/44(ambient) to 51/41. Under stressing the card for 15mins+ with rthdribl the temperatures with reference cooler were 83/59, and now with NV silencer 70/53. Also both CPU and NB temperatures went down 2 degrees ... all these measurements were done at 400/1100 clocks, which the GT card seems to handle very stable.
I was initially disappointed for not getting the quiet MSI copper cooler, but with the NV silencer, I'm pretty happy now. I have Nexus case, which has 12cm fan in the bottom of the case, and the airflow (as illustrated in http://www.nexustek.nl/breeze.htm ) from the fan goes directly in the NV silencer intake. The exhausted air is very warm and I'm happy to not push it in my case, as it would have been with the reference cooler or MSI copper cooler (it would have blown the warm air directly at my hard disk ).
I'm sorry about the long post, and hope this would help someone not happy with the reference cooler.