Test results: temperature

3D Mark 2005's Firefly Forest benchmark was placed in loop in order to properly stress the GPU. Ambient environment temperatures averaged near 20°C. With Zalman's FAN MATE 2 we had the ability to alter to fan speed to low and high RPM. This definitely had his impact on cooling performance and noise levels, we decided to tests the lowest and highest fan speed we could set with the FAN MATE 2 and added both into our 8800 cooling chart. Here are our results:



The HR-03 Plus performed very well without the addition of an extra cooling fan, but only because our test system offers decent airflow. With the extra fan installed it even improved its cooling performance in a dramatic way leaving everything else far behind. One point that has to be made here is that its performance really weights on what fan you'll be using, with a low torque 80mm fan you won't be getting the same results as we obtained with our high torque 92mm fan.

With less heatpipes and lesser contact area, the VF1000LED actually performed very well. Even in “IDLE” modus it could lower the GPU temperature compared to NVIDIA's stock cooling, and with the GPU being heavily loaded the difference became only bigger. Still, at such low RPM there’s room left for improvement, the heatsink felt quite warm which indicates that the heat transfer worked great. A quick turn on the fan controller decreased the temperature noticeable, this time the VF1000 LED even beat the NVIDIA stock cooling device tricked at 100% with 4°C and much lower noise production! Still not enough to be today's king of the hill in Geforce 8800 cooling, non-the less it is the second best performing product we've tested so far, compared NVIDIA's stock heatsink it could improve the GPU temperature with up to 15°C!

Test results: noise

Noise created by fans and spinning hard disks is not what everyone cares about, though some people are really keen on dead silent pc's, therefore we added a noise chart. Noise is measured with a Smart Sensor AR824 digital sound sensor 50cm away from our Antec PC housing. We stopped all fans in order to give an exact representation of the noise that is being created solely by the tested video card. The noise level of our testing environment is at 40,1 dBA, here are our results.



The VF1000 LED remained very silent through our tests, with the fan running at low setting we could bearable hear the fan in our silenced system, with other fans connected you may not even notice it. It also makes this card less noisy compared to the NVIDIA reference heatsink while improving the cooling abilities. Full fan speed offered awesome performance though you pay the price for it: more noise. In the end, the stock NVIDIA's heatsink with the fan tricked at 100% still gets beaten, noise wise and temperature wise, but at the same noise level the HR-03 performed just that little bit better then the VF1000 LED. Also notice how the MACS M-Sorceress II offered very silent cooling computing while keeping the GPU at low temperatures, a tight battle this one.

With the performance being tested it is now time to draw some conclusion ->