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Alpenföhn Peter VGA Cooler

Cooling/VGA & Other Cooling by leeghoofd @ 2011-09-06

Modern high end videocards can be small nuclear graphical powerplants. Putting out a lot of heat when working full load to render smooth frames per second in your favourite game. Sometimes the boxed aka reference cooler is up to the task and keeps everything at reasonable operating temperatures. Though many maxed out their cooling capacity or are just too darn loud. This is where companies alike Arctic Cooling, Thermalright,... and Alpenföhn come to your rescue. Todays Alpenföhn Peter VGA cooler will try to cool our Fermi based GTX480 graphics card in stock and overclocked configuration.

Installing on Fermi GTX480

We are using the same Asus Nvidia Fermi based GTX480 card to test the cooling performance of the Peter VGA cooler. Here are some shots of the disambling of the boxed/reference cooling solution.

As you can see a lot of thermal goo and pads all over the place. VRM cooling is great, via direct contact with the black heatsink. This also keeps the PCB nicely straight and level. We opted to test in a similar fashion as the Arctic cooler and removed the entire PCB plate, to see if there's an incompatibility with the delivered heatsinks. Plus it allows us to test if the air flow by the fans is appropriate to cool down the VRM area sufficiently.

Mounting the Alpenföhn heatsinks is childsplay with the included thermal glue. You just need to make sure that the front ram heatsinks don't interfere with the heatpipes, hence why you will probably need to use the smaller sized versions. The manual is a bit vague on which sinks to be used.

We tested the Peter VGA with two Alpenföhn 120mm Orange Wing boost fans and with two 140mm Orange Wing boost versions. As you can see the total unit is pretty tall and is fully ready, a 3-4 slot solution. Making SLI/Crossfire virtually impossible in most setups (this if you opt to go with a dual fan solution per cooler).

One way to install SLI is via the below picture, but no idea how far cooling performance will be impacted.

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