Introduction



Zalman is an industry pioneer when it comes down to cooling heated computer electronics, affecting the total system temperature and noise level in a design-friendly solution has been their marketing strategy for few years now. Their latest product is the Zalman VF1000 LED, a dual slot heatsink/fan video card cooling device with high compatibility in mind, a perfect challenge for 2007's most popular video card the NVIDIA's 8800GTS. Sneak peak:



The 8800 family has been brought on the after market exactly one year ago, though since the very beginning we didn't found too many manufacturers actually trying to serve better GPU cooling solutions, in fact we had to wait for the popular 8800GTS 320MB to show up early 2007 before anyone even bothered to improve the reference cooling device. Other manufacturers have passed our labs before but it was only recently when Zalman equipped us with their latest GPU heatsink/fan product, we were glad to have a look at Zalman's latest product and add it too our increasing 8800 air cooling charts.

In our today's article we'll be testing how the VF1000 LED handles the 8800GTS heat output and see how it can combine low temperatures with an acceptable noise level. Those same tests were repeated with competing products, here is a line-up:

Stock NVIDIA 8800GTS heatsink

ThermalRight HR-03 Plus with custom fan

MACS M-Sorceress II MA-8280-2

Zalman VF1000 LED

Our test setup consists out of the following components:

Test setup

Geoffreys' Test Setup
CPU	Intel E6600 @ 3GHz
Cooling	Zalman 9700 LED
Mainbord	Abit Fatal1ty FP-IN9 SLI
Memory	2x1Gb TEAMGROUP Xtreem 800MHz 4-4-4-10-35-4-10-10-10-2T
Graphics	Sparkle 8800GTS 320MB
Other	FSP Epsilon 900 PSU Maxtor 80Gb PATA HDD Seagate 200GB SATA HDD Antec Nine Hundred housing 20" Dell UltraSharp 2007FP TFT monitor

The Intel E6600 was being overclocked to 3GHz by changing the FSB from 266MHz to 333MHz and by keeping the multiplier at default (9). This way the CPU would score on par with the Intel E6850 based on the popular G0 stepping.

Teamgroup's pair of 1Gb DDR2 sticks were clocked to default settings via the NVIDIA 650i chipset.

ForceWare 163.44 drivers

While Windows Vista is now officially launched, we decided to test with a mature Windows OS (XP SP2), even if we wanted to, the lack of decent working NVIDIA drivers for Vista keeps us from testing on the new platform.

Benchmark methodology

The tests/benchmarks were completed with the Geforce 8800GTS at stock speeds and stock voltage levels. In order to obtain decent and reliable results we loaded the 8800GTS for exact 30 minutes and logged the maximum GPU core temperature using Rivatuner. System 'IDLE' temperatures were obtained by letting the system stand untouched for another 30 minutes. We also logged the test-room air temperature and recalculated the GPU temperature by adding/subtracting the differential air temperature. This means that we can now make a clear chart which does not only represent how good/bad a product can perform ("product A is x times better then product B"), but also shows you where our results are placed in real-life environments ("product A & B performed good/average/bad with our test setup, temperatures were...")

Let's head on to our today’s product ->