Removing the Stock Cooler

To remove the ACX cooler all we had to do was have a phillips head screwdriver and remove the four screws around the core, couldn’t be simpler than that!

Upon inspection, we were incredibly impressed with the amount of TIM EVGA has used with their GPUs. GPU vendors have built up a reputation of putting an obnoxious amount of TIM on the GPU cores that is a huge mess when you take the two apart. However, EVGA did great. Maybe a little more than the average user may apply, but compared to their competition, this is the best stock TIM spread we’ve seen!

Keep up the great work EVGA! For those that haven’t taken apart their own GPU and have no idea what we’re talking about, check out this photo of the TIM job from a competing GPU vendor.

A complete mess… no wonder it was overheating!
Back to EVGA… while the core is directly cooled by the main heatsink the rest of the board components are shielded by a brushed aluminum style heatsink plate:

The metal plate cools the VRMs & memory chips and it looks beautiful! Granted, we are pretty partial to the brushed metal look, but it’s nice to see a manufacturer go the extra mile and make sure all aspects of the card look great.

It also has the added bonus of making the card more friendly to use with after market AIO coolers and universal water blocks.

Removing the cooling plate takes a little more work than the ACX cooler due to the relatively large amount of screws that are involved, but it’s still nothing more than whipping out your phillips head screw driver.

We checked the thermal pads to ensure good contact was being made, which it was.

Here we can see also now see the VRM phases – 6 on the left side of the card for the core, and 2 on the right side for the memory.

Overall, the GTX 970 ACX2.0+ is a great looking card. Considering how relatively short the lifespan of ACX has been, EVGA have developed it into a great looking cooler that performs great!

Now let’s see how well the card performs!