Quote Originally Posted by dejanh View Post
Can somebody post a pic of what is supposedly being shorted? Is it on the backside of the card, where the X bracket sits? If it is how come it does not short by default then? I'm not sure I understood the problem from this thread and I'd be curious to see it before I decide to cool my cards with this block.
here is the explanation:

the stock heatsink standoffs go thru the pcb, and stick out on the back side of it by 1mm. when you tighten the stock X spring bracket, it sits on the standoffs and is therefore 1m above the pcb.

Since we are not using standoffs that go thu the pcb, when we tighten the x bracket, it comes to mate with the pcb backside. it's not a problem to touch the pcb, since these spots are grounded. but since we are bending the arms of the X spring bracket a tiny little bit more, the end of the arms might be sometimes slightly touching some surface mount components that are close to the grounded holes. it is very subtle, and doesn't happen systematically. It really depends on the height tolerances of said surface mount components. For example, we never had the problems during our validation testing, on several different ATI boards, including 5870, 5850's and 5970's.. this is the reason why it never caught our attention to begin with.

The fix to this problem was very simple: include washers that go under the X spring bracket so that it stays sufficiently above the board to never touch anything. the same result is achieved (without washers) by simply backing off the screws by a turn or two..