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All hardware geeks know its your videocard that is the main bottleneck in 3d game performance. They also know that in the case of Geforce 2+ cards its the speed of the ram on the card thats the bottleneck, not the core speed. In other words, overclock the core and youre wasting your time, but overclock the memory and you will get a few more fps. To assist in overclocking the video ram many places sell little heatsinks that you stick onto the ram to help cool things down. But a set of 8 of them costs anywhere from 30-50$! 30 bucks for some little lumps of copper that will only help you get 5 more mhz out of your ram? What the hell is with that?

Afrotech is here to save the day, the groovy hairstyle way.

Whats the cheapest and most widely available source of copper? Copper pennies of course! Apparently its the pennies made before 1982 that are 95% copper. The ones made after 1982 are like only 5% copper. So look around in your piggy bank for at least 40 really old pennies.

Once you've got them, clean them. I am a cheap guy and only used soap and water and the acidic properties of disgustingly warm coke to help clean them a bit. Some of them were still pretty dirty and oxidised though. Anyways, what people who are less lazy than me SHOULD do is drop the coins in a cupful of vinegar, and add a lot of salt and baking soda and stirr it around and stuff. I haven't done this since I was a kid but it used to de-oxidise copper better than anything I know of. Also, you should probably get a dremel or some other sort of power sanding device and sand off the designs of the pennies so that you are left with a bunch of smooth copper discs. Again, I was too lazy for that @;).

Here's a shot of my pennies drying off.


To make a ramsink, take a penny, smear thermal crap all over it, and use a tiny drop of superglue to stick it onto another penny. Then keep doing it. Rather than create a solid column of pennies, its probably better to stagger the arrangement of pennies so you increase the exposed surface area - duplicating the fins on a normal heatsink. I made my ramsinks 5 pennies high.


Then I used more thermal crud and more drops of superglue to stick the ramsinks onto my Gf2.




After sticking the card back into the machine, I was able to get the ram stable up to 380mhz (stock speed is 333mhz). 390mhz when I opened a window and let my really hot room cool down a bit. Is that an improvement? I don't know because I was too damn lazy to do 'before' tests! Anyways looking around the net it seems that 390mhz is a pretty decent Gf2 ram speed to reach, so for sure the project didn't make things any worse.



Total cost of the project: 40 cents, + 1/3rd tube of thermal paste + 1/5th tube of superglue = Ghetto ramsink cooled video card for LESS THAN ONE DOLLAR. To hell with those 40$ fancy shiny blue ramsink kits I say! Btw my Gf2 weighs about 1 kilo now lol.

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