Hardware Graphics Card Coolers Investigated

We put 11 third-party graphics card coolers to the test to see which, if any, is worth buying.

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cooling/2010/05/19/graphics-card-coolers-investigated/1

 

I miss the Prolimatech MK-13 in this review.

 

seems GPU cooling has a long long way to go
hope the Coolit Eco or Corsair H50 do versions soon that cool both gpu and cpu

 

Hm...that was always a hard word to spell in my books, but I reckon it's spelt as cinch, when I first see sync, I mentally pronounce sink.

 

What happened to the Setsugen?

 

This couldn't have come at a better time, as I'm looking to quieten a folding rig I'm working on. Vortexx Neo it is!

 

So wait...for HSFs that don't provide a sink for VRMs...did you just leave them bare?

But they said at the start of the review:

 

No Zalman coolers?
I've been a bit disappointed with my VF1000 fitted to a 8800GT, since it started getting a bit warmer I started getting crashes in games. All I had to do was turn up the speed of one of the internal fans, but it's changed my rig from being almost silent, to quite noisy.

It wasn't until I read

that I remembered that the fan on the graphics cooler is plugged into the motherboard...
DOH!
Because the CPU is water cooled, of course the motherboard will be throttling all the fans, because it thinks it's nice and cool, while the graphics card overheats enough to crash.
Now I feel like an idiot

 

would be intressting having a sapphire vapor-X as reference to this review. Since it comes with a upgraded cooling unit

 

Still feel that for maximum effectiveness we all should start attaching CPU towers to GPUs.

 

Am also shocked no Zalman coolers were reviewed - the GV1000 kept my 4870 nice and cool and quiet. The only comparisons I have to it though are the stock Gigabyte/Zalman cooler that was a 2pin and on 100% all the time (noisy!) and watercooling.

What I do know is it was easy to install and came with RAMSinks.

 

Agreed - I thought it didn't look right when I was reading it!

 

except you cant buy them separately.

 

I've used a T-RAD2 for over a year now on my 4850... Im more than happy with it, with a low speed 12cm Yate Loon on it, its far quieter than the stock cooler, and far cooler as well.

Well worth the £30 I payed for it.

 

I work for a company who sells Scythe products and apparently there were some compatibility issues with the Setsugen, which is why it went EOL. Scythe say a new version is to be release in the near future.

 

The stock cooler on my (admitedly low-end) HD4650 was insanely loud and not very effective. I replaced it with the Accelero S2 passive heatsink (looks identical to the S1).

It was quite tricky to fit, and the instructions are nearly useless, but now it's on the new cooler is silent and works fr more effectively than the stock one, even without any fans on the heatsink.

@barndoor101: I think they should compare the data to a Vapor-X card, because they're usually cheaper than buying a normal one plus your own 3rd party cooler. If the Vapor-X kicks all of these solutions here and you don't have to fit it yourself, then that would be the way to go.

 

Why is a £50 air cooler considered expensive, when nobody bats an eyelid at £65 waterblocks!?

 

I'm using an Artic Cooler Twin Turbo (not pro) for my overclocked HD4870, it lowered the temperature by 15°C on load, and 10°C on idle. It was a breeze to install, and the only problem I had was my own fault, my card was not reference design, so the VRAM coolers didn't fit. I had to file off the stock cooler so it would fit. It would also appear my pin was a 2-pin while I needed a 3-pin, so I had to replace that too.

It's run perfectly fine under heavy furmark benches, so I seriously don't get where the trouble is coming from.

 

When is watercooling cheap?

 

I think it's more like, you're paying so much for mediocre performance, if you pay a little more, you might as well have it watercooled, which yields much better performance. Of course, this is just for the waterblock, not the entire setup, but it's a good comparison.