Ok, here we go:
before
As you can see, this is one crowded system. With everthing I had crammed into that case, it's not wonder the chiset was getting no air. If you look VERY closely you can see the upper 1/3 of the chipset cooer just above the VC. Thats about the only area it had to move air.
Here is a closer look at the VC and chipset, i'm amaized temps were only in the high 40's full idle and maxing out around 55.
Here is the jingting, completely dis-assembled and waitin for installation. Upon origonally dumping out the bag that all the parts came in, I thought there had to be enough hardware to mount the thing twice. And, while I do still have a small pile of hardware left over, I did use roughly 3/4 of the hardware. YMMV of course as that is the idea behind this cooler, maximum flexibility to offer better cooling in virtually any system. Also, the copper base is incredibly well lapped, you can see the swirl marks from it being cut still but barely. I was attempting to take a picture of a screw sitting on it but, the camera kept picking up things in the background so, instead
here is a picture of my AV duct on my ceiling as a reflection on the copper base.
For those of you less familliar with the DFI NF4 line of boards
here is a pic of the bare board with stock cooler still installed.
As I hinted to last night, getting this cooler mounted with a NV silecer on a 7800gt is more than a tall task. I'm not one to say something is impossible, strickly out of my stuborn nature but, I was ready to call it quits and re-install the stock cooler multiple times. It took me all of two hours to find a position that suited my situation and it is a TIGHT fit still. And there are comprimises that had to be made. Two of the SATA ports are quite blocked off, the cooler would have to be moved to reach the CMOS battery. In addition, the copper base is anything but sitting on the chipset fully. I had to use the flexibility of the mounts to pull it very far off to one side, one reason I may not be seeing ideal cooling numbers.
Pics of final resting place:
from bottom of motherboard
from side of motherboard
from above
with VC installed
upon installing the VC I quickly ran into a more than small problem. The kit comes with some thumb nuts to tighten onto the screws that come through the motherboard, to make life a little easier but, there was a major clearance issue between the top, closest to the IDE connectors, thumb nut and the graphics card. They were rubbing, it was warping the board slightly and I could not have said for sure one way or another if it was jumping a pair of leads on the oposite side of a capacitor. The fix was extremely easy though, simply removed the thumb nut and replaced it with one of the standard nuts that came with the kit, completely solved the clearance issue and wasn't all that difficult, thank god.
picture of clearance issue