I admit it...I can't leave a good thing alone. I also wanted to see just how far this amazing piece of hardware could go. I seem to have gotten lucky as this card was a very good OC'er to begin with. The core would easily do 375 all day long but the memory was not quite as willing. Not wanting to do any voltage modding to the card I knew from my experience w OC'ing that my main enemy was heat. Looking at the factory HS/fan combo I noticed that although it provided fairly decent surface area, the fin arrangement poorly impeded flow across the memory chips. Not to mention the fact that there was no cooling of the memory whatsoever except for what little airflow did make it across the chips. After studying the situation for a bit and rummaging through what has become a rather large parts pile I began to feel that burn of an idea coming on. A quick trip to Compusa and Microcenter yeilded a pair of chrome HS for DDR memory for $10 and a cheap Hard Drive cooler for $14. A stop on the way home at the local hardware store turned up 2 Nylon spacers, 2 Allen head cap screws that would fit the original mounting holes in the card and 2 nuts for securing the first fan to the backside of the card. I already had some Artic Silver thermal epoxy, various grades of sandpaper and the most important piece of all.....A HS from an original 100Mhz Pentium. It's size and shape are perfect for this application and it also provided a small area on one side that was machined w a relief allowing it to clear the small transisitors on the left side of the GPU. Now for the good stuff.After removing the Factory HS and shim from the 9700 I took measurements for the spacing of the mounting holes and the size of the memory chips. A half hour w the trusty Dremel and I had in my hands enough small HS to cover what was needed on the card. After this I transferred the spacing of the holes to the backside of the Pentium HS and drilled a set of slightly over sized holes to allow for minor adjustments. After stripping the anodizing off with Stalume I set these parts aside.Now this may seem a little hairy but if one takes their time and is careful it's a piece of cake. The original HS mounting holes had to be opened up to allow for the screws I was using to fit. I realized after I could have found smaller hardware but figured I would give it a go anyway. You may not have to do this.Now, Take the Hard Drive cooler and remove the fans from it. Set these aside. Taking a small batch of Thermal Epoxy I glued the HS to the memory chips and the small aluminum plate on the back of the card. When this dried I flipped the card over, applied some Artic Silver to the backside of the Pentium HS and dropped it in place on the GPU. At this point I was ready to mount it firmly in place w the Cap screws. Being careful not to crush the GPU I flipped the card over, slipped the two 1/2 in tall spacers in place and slid the first fan onto the shafts of the screws. This was than carefully tightened in place w the two nuts. The back of the card was now complete.After a break for a cup of coffee and a diaper change..(My newborn son not me :) ) I proceeded to mix up another small batch of epoxy and applied a small blob to the back of the fan. I set this in place, Set a spare P4 HS on top and put it aside till after dinner. After this was dry enough to handle I cleaned up the wires by pigtailing and mounted the card in place on the MB. Yeah it blocks a PCI slot but so does the new FX. Besides, this card outperforms it by a large margin now. :)After firing up my test rig it was off to the races. First up, 3DMark03, Default res., at 380 Core 350 Mem. BINGO !! Stable through a solid one hour loop. Next, 390/364....Again, Solid as a rock. I knew I was starting to get into some real touchy territory here but I had a temp sensor on the Core and it still was within specs I have seen published. ( Approx 120F ). Let's keep going..400/371....DAM!! Locked up after 40 minutes. Turned the memory back to 364 and got the same result. Could the memory still have something left but the core doesn't. Let's see...390 Core and 375 Memory..WOOO HOOO!! Made it... Finally hit a wall at 395/375..Locked after approx 45 minutes...So there you have it....The card was run stable for 3 hours running 3DMark03 in loop mode. If your looking to wring every last little drop out of this card, give it a try. I managed to pick up around 2300 points in 3DMark2001SE and around 900 in 03. My PCMark score also saw a sizeable gain. Best of all...It runs FS2002 100% stable at 380/375 for a nice 4 hour flight. I managed around a 7-10 FPS increase on average with these settings...Not bad for less than $30 in partsThe pics below should help explain what I have done. Hopefully the mods will allow them to remain up..Thanks for letting me ramble away. To those who wish to try it, Good Luck. Send me an E mail or PM if you have any questions...Bobby

Good job!

Sounds like you got bigger go-nads than me. Had I desired the same result, I would have just dug out the ole credit card and ordered me up one of these: http://www.sapphiretech.com/VGA/9800proult.asp

LoL Big,Yeah but I already had the 9700. Besides, It runs as fast just doesnt have some of the programming. Although the new Omega's have the softmod which does add some of the instruction programming. Thanks Guys !Bobby