Take note of the small chip that resembles a HSI bridge:

This chip is responsible for the communication between the PCBs and that they work together as a whole.

Samsung’s 1.4ns chips are installed on GeForce 7950 GX2 cards:

Now we can take a look at the cooling system such graphics cards come with. Here’s the native sticker from Nvidia:

The plastic casing that covers the cooler’s ribs is secured with two screws you can find right under the sticker. Generally speaking, the cooling system they install on the GeForce 7950 GX2 is very bad. Here’s a photo of its back side:

The copper sole and the good thermal interface are all right, but won’t help much when the heat dissipation area is so small. Just count up the number of the ribs:

This is in fact a folded sheet of, hopefully, copper.

So, we’ve got a cooler made of an aluminum alloy, with a copper insert in the base and a few ribs. It cools the GPU and, through thick thermal pads, the memory chips. On the bottom PCB it also cools the chip that combines the two GPUs into a SLI tandem. And this is the cooler of a top-end product! The cooling quality is poor, to put it mildly. Even in idle mode, the driver and RivaTuner RC 20 reported a temperature of 50°C – prior to any modifications. The level of noise in 3D application is a different issue. Two fans are louder than one, you know.

Let’s leave it to Nvidia’s engineers to work on those issues, though. Before attempting to volt-mod one of the most expensive graphics card available today, read the following disclaimer and think again if you indeed want to do that.