A Zalman cooler for my GeForce 6200

Recently I had to replace my old NVidia GeForce 6200, and sadly the new one was equipped with a small and noisy fan.

Fig. 1 - My NVidia GeForce 6200 with its noisy fan
(before surgery)

I wanted to replace this small fan by a really silent cooler, and because I was already happy with my Zalman CPU cooler, I decided to look for a Zalman for my GeForce 6200 too.

It's a shame, this kind of graphical card was already too old, in October 2010, and was not supported by Zalman coolers anymore. I had to find a trick !

My idea was to buy a Zalman VF700-Cu, even if it's not officially compatible with GeForce 6200, in order to make it fit, by myself.

WARNING: The following steps imply voiding the warranties of both the graphical card and the GPU cooler. In case of problem, NVidia and Zalman will not help people who modified their hardware. This article will only show you how I did it myself, at my own risk. If you are not sure about your skills, don't try this. I have absolutely no responsibility, if you try and fail. This experiment can damage and destroy your graphical card.

The beginning of the classical installation procedure is quite easy, everything fits really well (screws and heatsinks).

But in the end, it's impossible to make the big fan (called "FHS Assembly") fit on the old graphical card, because of the capacitors on the left !

My solution was to cut a small part of the "metallic base" of the fan, as shown on the picture here below.

Fig. 2 - A bottom view of the Zalman VF700-Cu.
The blue scissors show where I have cut.

This is not very easy to cut, choose a big wire cutter, but once it's done, everything will fit rather well.

Fig. 3 - My NVidia GeForce 6200 with a modified Zalman VF700-Cu
The yellow-blue arrow shows where was the removed part.

Fig. 4 - A detail of the obstacle and removed part
of the Zalman VF700-Cu

The result is impressive :
The GPU temperature has dropped from 51°C to 36°C, and is very silent !

Thanks to Zalman coolers, now I've got a new problem :
I can't bear the hard drives' noise anymore :-)