The Cool-Matic NV45 Continued...

Now that I am confident the Cool-Matic's are going to fit perfectly it's time to mount the water blocks onto the recipients. Lining up the five main screw ports to the Innovatek will allow for a perfect fit. What we did was lay the Cool-Matic with the with the machined CPU and ram decks facing up - we simply laid the card square on top the Cool-Matic and fine tuned the alignment by getting a visual on the female threads from the water block.

With the Cool-Matic and the GeForce 6800 Ultra aligned and awaiting the retention screws, now is a good time to install the self sticking CPU component spacer. This spacer is the white square foam pad that will protect the PCB components from damage when installing the back plate. Gently peel back the pad to reveal the stick side and press fit it to the center of the CPU area as shown below.

Since we are moving right along, we installed the back plate. Each screw was hand tightened till we needed to screw driver, at which time we slow tightened the screws in a criss-cross pattern making sure we put a 1/2 turn on each of the opposite corners until the play was gone. Then we turn the screws an additional 1/2 turn to what we feel is more than enough retention, which in all is just a little than finger tight.

The CPU backing plat is now installed, if you have alignment problems, now is the time to fix it. Making sure our alignment was near perfect throughout the installation process, we can now install the 5 screws that require the retention springs to finish off the installation. Remember do not torque these screws even with a single inch pound of torque, this could damage the GPU and or ram!

Again you will want to use a criss-cross pattern and lightly turn the screws hand tight before putting a driver to them. In our case we tightened the screws till the point we got resistance and then put a little tenth of a turn to snug fit. Notice we said snug? This does not mean tighten them down with a driver using brut force. You want this system as snug as possible without play and pockets between the surfaces. Be very gentle with these screws, you can break the memory modules very easily with excessive over torque.