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VGA Cooler Roundup April 2006

Cooling/VGA & Other Cooling by jmke @ 2006-04-24

6 different VGA coolers are tested in our latest roundup, products from Arctic Cooling, Sytrin and Zalman stressed using an XFX 7800GT running at default and overclocked speeds, while each heatsink is tested at different fan speeds and GPU temperature and noise readings are recorded. What cooler will suite you best? Read on to find out.

Zalman VF900-Cu: Testing

Inside the system

The VF900-Cu is very compact and you won’t run into any problems fitting your graphics card inside your case with the unit on

Madshrimps (c)

SLI is no problem with this cooler

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Test Results

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With the fan at 12v there is quite a drop in GPU temperature, but the noise level is borderline tolerant; when slowing down to 7v you strike a good balance between noise/performance; for those seeking utter silence the 5v setting will be ideal, below ambient noise level and still acceptable performance.

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With an overclocked GPU the VF900-Cu's heatpipes kick into action as the overall lead increases over the stock cooling. Even with the fan at 5v it performs better than the stock cooling at 100%, performance of the compact Zalman unit is impressive!

Overall Impression

Priced at ~€35 this compact VGA cooler from Zalman offers an admirable price/performance/noise balance; whisper quiet operation is easily obtained by reducing the fan’s rotation speed with the included fan controller, while thermal performance surpasses that of the stock heatsink. On of the strengths of this cooler is the wide compatibility, you’ll have a hard time finding a VGA card which does not allow to VF900-CU to be fitted.

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