The sole is polished well:

You can see traces of the milling machine, but it’s all right. The manufacturers just don’t strive to achieve a mirror-like polish nowadays. I took a Sapphire X800 XL graphics card as a carrier and testbed for this cooler. The card normally comes with an OEM version of the Zalman VF700 cooler:

The all-aluminum model is not available in retail – you can only get it with some particular graphics cards. Despite the all-aluminum ribbing, the cooler is far better than standard coolers usually installed on graphics cards of that class. One more reason for me to choose this card was that the air cooler cools not only the GPU, but also the graphics card’s PCB which the Tide Water doesn’t do. Well, you’ll see the results of the test soon. As for installation, it was simple to mount the water-block on the GPU:

I didn’t even have to use the included fastening extensions. They should have positioned the fittings at an angle, however:

The pipe from the water-block pressed down on a memory chip heatsink after installation, and the heatsink eventually fell off. It means that you may have troubles installing the cooler on graphics cards where there are tall elements near the GPU. It won’t take you long to install the cooler on the PCB:

As you see, you can only install a not-very-thick expansion card into the neighboring slot. Frankly speaking, I tried some popular audio cards and TV tuners and had no problems with any of them. The neighboring expansion card will block the air inlets on the reverse side of the main unit of the cooler, however.

The card and the cooler get along quite nicely together…

…but there must be at least one free slot between them.