Now that we have ogled at the cooler, it's time to get our hands dirty and replace the stock cooler with the FC-ZV9.  This cooler does take up the slot directly below your VGA card, but since mine is one of those little PCI-E 1x slots, I'm not too worried about it.  You should keep this in mind if you are considering purchasing this cooler, however.

First, you need to detach the old VGA cooler.  With the XFX 7900GS, this requires the removal of four screws on the back of the card, but this may vary from manufacturer to manufacturer.

Once the screws are removed you should be able to pull the cooler off with a little force if it doesn't just drop into your hand. Below is the card without the cooler before cleaning off the GPU.

The old cooler had a copper base that wasn't polished or even smoothed down at all.  I'm sure that better performance could be obtained by simply lapping the stock heatsink.

I looked at it after cleaning the thermal grease off, and you can see how much rougher it is than the mirror-like base of the Zalman FC-ZV9.

I also cleaned up the GPU, and now we're ready to get things installed!

First I installed the nipples in the proper retention guides.  For this card to mount properly you need to use the outermost holes.  You can also see the rubber washers in place here.

The next step was to place the red RAM heatsinks on the RAM chips.

When doing this you need to be careful to place them how you want them. If you have to remove one to reseat it, you're going to need a new adhesive pad.  I made certain that they were all centered and facing the same direction.