Conclusive thoughts

With the 8800GTS introduced back in 2006 it surprised us that only now Zalman could come up with an after market heatsink to improve the G80 standard cooling. Having a closer look at this product reveals that Zalman never had plans on making a personal heatsink for the 8800 series, their newest product includes compatibility with near every mounting socket found on video cards in the last few years. This way, the VF1000 LED is not only a daunting competitor for the Thermalright HR-03 plus or MACS M-Sorceress II, it also means serious trouble to many other heatsink available on the market today, including those we've tested in one of our previous articles.

With the VF1000 LED, Zalman took their VF video card heatsink series to the latest iteration. A dual slot cooling device was born existing out of a full copper heatsink combined with a regular 80mm led fan. In our tests we saw how it could decrease the standard G80 GPU temperature with 15°C compared to the stock NVIDIA heatsink, while the noise level remained acceptable. Not only that, those who are keen on silenced computing could easily lower the noise created by this cooling device while keeping better then stock cooling performance.

However, looking at other after market cooling solutions, it must be said that the VF1000 LED can't claim the same clean victory as it gets when being compared it to the GF8800 stock heatsink. The Thermalright HR-03 Plus comes fan-less, this gives the user the opportunity to go for extreme low noise levels or on the other hand for the best possible cooling solution. With a high speed 92mm fan we had available for testing we had no trouble beating the VF1000 LED, though with the generated noise level kept even for both cooling devices the VF1000 LED fell only 2°C behind the HR-03 plus which still comes with 2 more heatpipes and more heat dissipating area. Also notice how the MACS M-Sorceress II performed very on par with the VF1000 LED, temperature and noise wise.

The installation went without issues, though we do feel that the VF1000 LED lacks a few small ZM-RHS1 heatsinks. In fact, Zalman requires you to first install the ZM-RHS88 RAM heatsink before actually installing the VF1000 LED, although the 8800 board components can be perfectly kept cool while only using ZM-RHS1 heatsinks.

Price wise, you can find the Zalman VF1000 LED for around $50, though the extra ZM-RHS88 heatsink required for GeForce 8800 video cards will cost you another $30, can you really justify spending that much money when the stock NVIDIA heatsink already is far from bad at all?



+ Excellent cooling efficiency
+ Offers high performance as well as low noise
+ Adjustable fan speed
+ Compatibility
+ Easy install/uninstall

- Lacks GF8800 memory/PWM cooling
- Dual slot (not really a problem in many cases)
- Price: $50




I would like to thank Zalman for providing us this review sample and for having the patience to let us do all our tests.