there's the 6870 of all of its d
heatsinked glory so you can clearly see
the GPU right here in the middle of the card surrounded by eight memory chips
all right we've got not a whole lot of major heat producing
components which should be quite obvious from the design of the heatsink because
you can see it only makes contact with the card here for the RAM here for the
RAM here for some voltage regulation and then here for the GPU itself we've got
three heat pipes on this copper hunk
that looks actually just like a copper base and aluminum fins we've got some
additional heat sinks right here above the vrm so you can see that's directly
over top of where this thermal strip is making contact there you can see this
thin heat pipe arrangement actually moves freely within the shroud so what
that means is it's actually being bolted on separately by these four
see you can see those ones will actually move that piece and then the rest of the
assembly where this is a large heatsink so this piece is metal and this piece is
plastic so this is all one big heatsink is all
attached separately so that's by the screws which are here
here here here here
this is kind of neat the way they've done the shroud here as you know the
back of this GPU only has about a quarter well half of one slot for
exhaust so the way they've shaped the plastic shroud here is that the airflow
goes from the fan here through
all right so it comes through comes through these fins and then ultimately
gets redirected by this wavy piece of plastic so that it all
goes out the one side so there you are that's my in-depth look
at the cooler of the 5870 there's the 4-pin pwm fan connector that i better
make sure i don't forget to put on when i reinstall this
maybe we can look a little bit more closely at the card i'm not sure what
else to really tell you about it i'm not an electrical engineer so
i can't really give you too many details about what everything is on here
i can tell you this card's very water block unfriendly though just the
positioning of these guys in here and how high these are means you're going to
have to waste a lot of copper to make a block for this because it have to be
quite thick to get over those or i guess you could put
such a thin strip though like you could you could put a gap so that the whole
thing sits over top of that but yeah i don't know i'll be interested to
see what guys like ek come up with because it'll probably be mostly them my
heat killer who bother to come out with blocks for like a mid-range performance
card typically we only see full cover blocks for the really high
end cards it'd be really easy to uh to water cool this card with a GPU
block though because you just throw a GPU block on here throw eight RAM sinks
on and then basically find some way to cool this like chop up some heat sinks
or something but like a nice beefy thing on there as long as you find something
thin and tall it should be pretty good so there you have it naked Radeon
6870 thank you for checking it out don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips