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There are countless after-market VGA
coolers available today and many of them fail to provide any
improvements over the standard coolers, serving more purpose
as decorations rather than real cooling solutions.
But there are of course a number of good
quality products, though not all of them suitable for this
roundup. This roundup will be looking at the high-end
options out there, meaning there will be no passively cooled
heatsinks. As far as I know there is no passively cooled
heatsink that is capable of keeping a GeForce 7800 GTX
graphics card cool.
The installation process in my opinion
is also very important, as users will not want to place
their already expensive graphics card in any danger. For
this reason I have dropped products such as the Thermaltake
Schooner, this passively cooled heatsink is also a mess to
install. The Thermalright V-1 and V-1 Ultra are easily the
most complex VGA coolers to install out of the six included
in this roundup. Although the installation process is a
little tricky, with a little bit of care I do not believe
any harm will come to the graphics card.
Thermalright's V-1 Ultra
Next in line for difficulty would be the
Zalman’s VF700-Cu and VF900-Cu coolers. Once again with a
little care both coolers can be installed very easily. Both
the Thermalright and Zalman coolers are compatible with
almost all ATI and NVIDIA graphics cards. This is the
primary reason why the installation process is slightly
trickier than the Arctic-Cooling models. In an effort to
keep things amazingly simple, Arctic-Cooling does not offer
universal designs. Instead they design different revisions
of the same cooler to suit different graphics cards,
allowing their products to fit like a glove.
Zalman's VF-700 Cu and VF-900 Cu
The Arctic-Cooling NV5 Rev.3 and the
newer Accelero X1 are designed specifically for GeForce 6800
and 7800 series graphics cards. Therefore, they offer the
easiest installation process out of all the VGA coolers
included in this roundup. The only downside being they will
probably not support upcoming graphics cards unless they use
the exact same design. Furthermore, the Accelero X1, will
not suit any ATI based graphics cards; for this you will
need the Accelero X2.
Arctic Cooling's NV Silencer 5 (rev 3), and Accelero X1
When it comes to operating volumes the
Arctic-Cooling products are hard to beat, though the Zalman
products are also whisper quiet. The Thermalright VGA
coolers offer impressive performance, though the standard
fan does make a slight hum. The great thing about the V-1
coolers is that they can utilize dual 80mm fans allowing
them to still offer unbeatable performance while making very
little noise. However, being the most expensive coolers in
this roundup, users may be hesitant to purchase additional
fans for this heatsink.
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