 There's the 6870 and of all of its de heat sinked glory so you can clearly see the GPU right here in the middle of the card surrounded by eight memory chips all right we've got not a whole lot of major heat producing components which should be quite obvious from the design of the heat sink because you can see it only makes contact with the card here for the RAM here for the RAM here for some voltage regulation and then here for the GPU itself we've got three heat pipes on this copper hunk that looks actually just like a copper base and aluminum fins we've got some additional heat sinks right here above the VRM so you can see that's directly over top of where this thermal strip is making contact there you can see this fin the heat pipe arrangement actually moves freely within the shroud so what that means is it's actually being bolted on separately by these four so you can see those ones will actually move that piece and then the rest of the assembly where this is a large heat sink so this piece is metal and this piece is plastic so this is all one big heat sink is all attached separately so that's by the screws which are here here here here here this is kind of neat the way they've done the shroud here as you know the back of this GPU only has about a quarter well half of one slot for exhaust so the way they've shaped the plastic shroud here is that the airflow goes from the fan here through all right so it comes through comes through these fins and then ultimately gets redirected by this wavy piece of plastic so that it all goes out the one side so there you are that's my in-depth look at the cooler of the 5870 there's the four pin PWM fan connector that I better make sure I don't forget to put on when I reinstall this maybe we can look a little bit more closely at the card I'm not sure what else to really tell you about it I'm not an electrical engineer so I can't really give you too many details about what everything is on here I can tell you this card is very water block unfriendly though just the positioning of these guys in here and how high these are means you're gonna have to waste a lot of copper to make a block for this because it'd have to be quite thick to get over those or I guess you could put it such a thin strip though like you could you could put a gap so that the whole thing sits over top of that but yeah I don't know I'll be interested to see what guys like EK come up with because it'll probably be mostly them my heat killer who bother to come out with blocks for like a mid range performance card typically we only see full cover blocks for the really high-end cards would be really easy to to water cool this card with a GPU block though because you just throw a GPU block on here throw eight RAM sinks on and then basically find some way to cool this like chop up some heat sinks or something but like a nice beefy thing on there as long as you find something thin and tall it should be pretty good so there you have it naked radion 6870 thank you for checking it out don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips