A closer look at the Auras Fridge heatsink

The Auras Fridge (JES-988) heatsink is a cooling product which focuses on passively cooling the video card. Therefore, the heatsink is very large in size and comes with wide 'breathing' channels in between the cooling fins. The heatsink has long high performance heatpipes running through to entire heat exchanger; even with pipes this long the high performance is guaranteed. On top of the heatsink Auras has added two fan holders. Although that Auras is aiming for passive cooled video cards with their Auras Fridge, they know that current generation high-end graphical processor exhaust a tremendously amount of heat, and in some situations the heatsink may require additional support from a fan just so to prevent the GPU from overheating. The fan clips are tightened to the heatsink via 2 screws on each side of the heatsink. The user can unscrew the fan holder and flip it over; this makes the heatsink not only compatible with 80mm fans, silent 120mm fans can also be attached properly this way.



The center of the heatsink features a copper cold plate where the heatpipes are all stacked together in order to share the heat load over each heatpipe and thus the entire heatsink cooling surface.



Sharp bends, 90° corners and complicated fin design, Auras offers excellent production quality.



The copper base plate is (nickel?) plated and is comes with a high polish finishing. The heatsink offers 3 different mounting holes; this gives the JES988 a high compatibility ratio. The included screws have springs in order to divide the mounting pressure over each screw; this should result in higher performance as well as less chance in broken hardware.



Not only the GPU is being treated well, Auras added 11 small size heatsinks which can be either used on memory chips or high performance voltage regulating modules. The heatsinks are being attached to the video card via high performance thermal pads. At first sight these thermal pads looked very familiar to me... they are exactly like the Thermattach T411 tape I reviewed earlier here at Madshrimps. Here is quick reminder of what we found out back then:

+ Excellent bounding capability
+ Decent cooling capability
+ Easy install/uninstall

- One/two times able to apply
- Low availability

It was a pleasure to me that Auras added those thermal pads to the Fridge heatsink, they offer good cooling and bounding performance and they aren’t that hard to install either. As with every thermal pad, it can be used only once, maybe two times, hopefully we can get a wider availability of this product through retail channels because they are worth it, they may come in handy when the user switches video card often.



Next up, installing the heatsink, and the issue's we had to deal with ->