Conclusive thoughts

To start with, you get a huge heatsink which uses heatpipe technology, combining aluminum with copper material this product should produce good results at a low price and low weight. The Fridge appeals nice and comes with high compatibility, although the latter is questionable. I tried 3 different video cards where with only one of the three the Fridge wanted to install successfully. With the Fridge, the heatpipes which come out of the base plate take a corner outside the main heat exchanger, and then they turn back into the aluminum fin array. Problem: the heatpipes seem to be reaching too far in some situations, the picture below describes best how close it actually is:



Even though the base plate comes with three different mounting holes and thus offers large compatibility, it still is to be questioned if the JES988 will eventually fit on your card or not. My thoughts are that Auras could have easily made the heatpipes turn 1cm earlier, this would not have an impact on the performance but it would certainly solve the compatibility issues.

Attention: Right before publishing the review we received the news from Auras tech support the their engineers have made last few changes to the design of the Fridge heatsink. They located the socket closer to the edge of the heatsink and thus you should no longer have issues when installing the JES988 on most graphic cards. Difference between our test sample and the final revision of the Auras Fridge JES-988 heatsink:

Revised Version ----- Original Version


On to the performance, there is little to complain about. The Fridge is excellent in passively cooling the video card, even though our housing is known for its cooling capabilities there was so much headroom left that the Fridge shouldn't come into problems anytime soon, and your system remains deadly silent too! Passive 8800GT cooling done right, we all remember Sparkle's attempt to passively cool the 8800GT.

For the overclockers out there, the JES988 support 80mm and 120mm fan. Adding a high performance 120mm yields super performance, compared to the NVIDIA reference heatsink we saw a temperature drop of over 25°C! Lowering the fan speed didn't really change the situation; we got the same performance while now the sound level became a bit more acceptable. In the end, this is a heatsink designed specially for passively cooling the video card, due to the wide surface area even the slightest breeze of air will get you quite satisfying GPU temperature levels. If you decide to add a fan, go for a low noise fan since high RPM yields in nearly no extra performance.

Price wise Auras will sell their Fridge heatsink at just over € 30 in European regions, or about $45 in the USA. That is MSRP. With the promised compatibility that price is very acceptable because you don't have to waste money every time you upgrade your video card even though it is still uncertain what future VGA sockets will look like.

The Fridge will be in store end of April, early May; in Europe at Alternate and Cooling.pl and in the USA at Newegg.

Final thoughts wrapped up:

The Auras Fridge (JES-988):

+ High performance passive cooling
+ Noiseless
+ Doesn’t require a lot of airflow to perform
+ Performs excellent even with low performance fans
+ High compatibility with final (retail) samples
+ Price: MSRP around €30/$45

- Blocks the SLI/Crossfire bridge
- Low availability



I want to thank Helen from Auras Technology for providing us their reviewing sample and quick responses to our inquiries. That's it for today, until next time!