Introduction

It has been more than 2 years since our last VGA cooler roundup and much has changed since then; the heat output of current video cards has surpassed that of older CPUs, which makes it now quite a challenge to cool your high end video card silently. While two years ago you could get away with a passive cooled Radeon 9700 Pro, if you attempt to do this with ATI’s latest X1900 series you might end up with a smoking pile of rubble. That bring us to today, I have 6 different VGA coolers on the test bench from Arctic Cooling, Zalman and newcomer Sytrin. Unfortunately Thermalright’s V-1 Ultra arrived after I’ve finished all tests so expect a follow-up article with which pit their offering to the contenders we have here today: Arctic Cooling NV Silencer 5 (Rev. 3) Weight: 428gr Material: AlCu Fan Speed: 2000rpm -- Arctic Cooling Accelero X1 Weight: 262gr Material: AlCu Fan Speed: 500-2000rpm -- Zalman VF900-Cu Weight: 185gr Material: Cu Fan Speed: 1350-2400rpm -- Zalman VF700-Cu Weight: 270gr Material: Cu Fan Speed: 1350-2650rpm -- Zalman Fatal1ty FS-V7 Weight: 270gr Material: Cu Fan Speed: 2050-3100rpm -- Sytrin KuFormula VF1 Plus Weight: 242gr Material: AlCu Fan Speed: 1550-3150rpm -- As you can see in the photos on the left, all coolers where tested inside a case, which brings us to the test setup:

Test Setup

JMke's Test Setup
CPU	Opteron 144 @ 2.7Ghz
Cooling	Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 @ 50%
Mainboard	Asus A8N SLI Premium
Memory	2 * 512Mb PC3200 OCZ
Other	XFX 7800GT GlobalWin 520W Silent PSU Maxtor 200GB IDE HDD

The XFX 7800GT video card was kindly provided by Comtechnology.be



The system was installed inside an Antec Lanboy, a mid-sized tower case made of aluminum, it doesn’t come with case fans, but supports 2x80mm (1*font/1*rear) – I placed a very silent Sharkoon Silent Eagle 1000 in the rear running at 12v.

I placed a dBA (AR824) meter next to the closed side panel at approximately 10cm; without the system powered on the ambient noise in the test room measured 35.6dBA (in the photo below you’ll notice that even the slightest noise of the camera is picked up). When the system is powered on without a VGA fan running the noise increased to 37.8dBA. Some VGA coolers dropped below this noise level making them extremely silent (~2dBA over ambient isn’t particularly bad).



I placed a thermal sensor at the in-take of the case measuring the temperature of the air that’s being pulled into the case, with the case closed the ambient temperature inside the case easily surpassed 25°C with in-take temperature at 23°C. The closed environment leads to higher temperatures for all coolers, testing them inside a case gives real-world results which will differ quite a bit from those tests done outside a case.

Outside a case there is plenty of cool air for the cooler’s fan to blow onto the heatsink, inside a case however the air blowing onto the heatsink will be higher causing higher GPU temperatures (logical) but not all coolers behave the same when changing inside/outside testing scenario. It’s not like you can simply add X°C to all your results and be done with it.

To test the impact I tested the Zalman VF900-Cu and VF700-Cu with the case panel off and measured the difference:



With fans at 12v the VF700-Cu performs quite well with the case panel removed, trailing the VF900-Cu by only ~5°C. When the case panel is installed the difference increases to 7°C. However look at the results from the VF900 with its fan at 5v, with the case panel removed it performs worse than the VF700, but with the case closed it has a small lead!

So choosing to test the VGA coolers inside a case will indeed give a more realistic overview of their performance.

Test Methodology

in-take temperature was measured at 23°C for all tests, but temp fluctuations, different mounting and user error can account up to 1-3°C of inaccuracy in the obtained results. Please keep this in mind when looking at the results. Each heatsink was tested repeatedly; if I got questionable results the test was restarted.

The VGA card was stressed by running Real-Time HDR continuously until temperatures.

Arctic Silver kindly send us their “Lumière” thermal testing compound which has the same color as Ceramique, but only a break in time of 30min!

Arctic Silver’s ArctiClean was used to clean off thermal paste between tests.

The XFX 7800GT was tested at two different GPU Clock speeds, 400Mhz and 460Mhz.

The fan speed was regulated differently depending on the VGA cooler:
- The Arctic Cooling models fan speed can be changed through Rivatuner, I set it to 25% , 50% and 100%.
- The Zalman models use 3-pin fan connectors and I used a 3-speed Acousti fan speed regulator which sets voltage to 12v, ~7v and 5v.
- The Sytrin comes with its own fan speed selector and the unit was tested at High/Medium/Low.

Now that you know what products are in this test and how they will be tested it’s time to go over the installation producers of each cooler, see what’s inside the box and how good they performed ->

Standard Cooling nVidia 7800GT

Depending the graphics card you have, your cooling needs will certainly differ, the standard cooling all video cards is made and tested to cool the GPU and Memory sufficiently in a hot environment. The maximum operating temperature of the video card is also higher than your average CPU so there’s a bit more headroom when it comes down to designing a cooling solution for the a graphics card.

The 7800GT has an internal shutdown alarm in case the GPU temperature exceeds 115°C, so if the stock cooling keeps the card running below 90°C there is enough room left to comfortable run the card for several years in a row without overheating issue.

If you think your video card will run faster because it’s 10°C cooler, you are mistaken, what a cooler running GPU does offer you is maybe a bit more overclocking headroom and the possibility to run the heatsink’s fan at lower speeds while keeping the temperatures below critical levels.



The 7800GT ranks between the 7900GTX and 7900GT when it comes down to power consumption. The ATI X18xxx and X19xx cards and the nVidia 7800GTX 512Mb are really the hot potatoes out today; their dual slot cooling solutions are not there just for show.

The 7800GT doesn’t need an extravagant cooling solution, the included cooler has a small copper core which dissipates heat to the surrounding aluminum fins; the small fan which blows air through the air-duct is very loud at 100% speed, during normal 2D operation the speed is reduced to ~25% and during gaming session it runs at 40-50%. At this level the noise generation is doable if you’re not into silent computing.



The DDR3 memory chips don’t run very hot, a very small heatsink is all what is needed to keep them running fine, extreme cooling of these memory chips does not lead to noticeable overclocking capabilities, making the GPU the primary target for an aftermarket solution.

The stock cooler covers both GPU and memory chips and can be uninstalled by removing the series of screws from the back of the card. Before doing though I advise you heat up the heatsink, either by using a hairdryer, or by stressing the video card right before you remove it from your system. This will make it very easy to pull the heatsink away from the card.


Standard heatsink from MSI 7800GT - identical to the one of the XFX

Using Arctic Silver ArctiClean I removed the remains of the thermal pads on the memory chips and the thermal paste from the GPU.


The Aluminum bar you see at the top of the PCB was removed later on to allow installation of the third party coolers




The FAN control issue

In the last 2 months I’ve used three 7800GT cards from different manufacturers, while packaging and overall design were slightly different, all of them displayed the same anomaly when it came down to fan speed control. First I installed one from MSI, the fan was spinning at 100% at all times and I could not get it to slow down, several driver reinstalls later the problem still remained, the fan runs at 100% in all states either 2D or 3D. During an unrelated test I unplugged the fan on the MSI card and plugged it back in while the system was running, the fan did not spin up to 100% and I was able to control the fan speed through Rivatuner.

There is some good information on how to set up Rivatuner to tune fan speed on nVidia cards on this page;

The next 7800GT card I tried was from XFX, it gave me the same symptom as the MSI, 100% fan speed at all times, then randomly after xx reboots the fan control came to life and fan speed throttled to 25% when in 2D.

To make things complete I tried an e-VGA 7800GT CO which features a larger copper base but the same fan, it also ran at 100% from the start, removing all nVidia drivers from the system and cleaning with Driver Cleaner Pro and reinstalling the latest ones from the nVidia.com site enabled the fan throttling on the e-VGA.

Apparently I’m not the only one experiencing these problems as there are numerous forum posts over the web from people who bough a 7800GT card and found it to be very loud. Gainward posted a hardware-hack workaround for the problem which can seen here.

With the stock cooler issues out of the way it’s time to install our first third party heatsink/fan solution ->

Arctic Cooling NV Silencer 5 (Rev. 3)

Anybody who has ever looking into third party coolers for their graphics card in the last couple of years has stumbled upon the Silencer series from Arctic Cooling. Since the first incarnation this VGA cooler was very successful with a low price, easy installation and excellent performance/noise ratio. The model on the test bench today is from the NV (which, as you guessed it, stands for nVidia) series, the 5 revision 3 adds compatibility for the 7800GT(X) to the short-list.


Photo © Arctic Cooling

Compatibility

While the Silencer series offers near plug and play installation it does skimp a bit on the compatibility front, by designing their products to fit only a limited range of VGA cards they can keep installation hassle to a minimum, but it does mean you most likely will buy a new third party VGA cooling when you upgrade.




The NV Silencer 5 (Rev. 3) fits on:

Geforce 6800 AGP Series

FX 4000 AGP

Geforce 6800 PCIe Series

Geforce 7800 PCIe series

Quadro FX 1400, 3400, 3450, 4400 ,4500

Some third party PCB designs might interfere with this cooler so that’s why they have posted a nifty height restriction drawing (.pdf) at their product page.

Installation

It’s simply a matter of placing the thermal pads on the memory chips, applying a bit of thermal paste on the core, and then installing the unit on the card.


When you remove the Silencer, the thermal pads stick to the heatsink

Compared to the stock cooling this thing is huge


At the back side a rubber pad and metal mounting bracket is used to hold the cooler in place.



A good fit:

Inside the system

The Silencer series expels heat out the back, inside the package you’ll find a replacement PCI bracket which needs to be placed right under the VGA card.



Looking straight down onto the motherboard you can see that the Silencer is SLI friendly, enough room left to install a second VGA card. However the PCI slot next to the bottom PCIe will be rendered unusable due to the size of the Silencer.




Test Results

First with the 7800GT at stock speeds:



I repeated these tests several times but it seemed that changing the fan speed through Rivatuner did not impact performance a whole lot, if at all. Even after 1 hour stress tests the temperatures hardly fluctuated. [note: I plan to re-do these tests to triple verify my findings]

Let’s turn up the heat and overclock



The extra heat production translates in measurable difference in temperature between the fan speed settings. While the thermal performance is not stellar compared to the stock cooling, the noise reduction is very remarkable. For those seeking extreme silence the 25% fan speed setting will drop the noise level below ambient and even at 50% the Silencer remains whisper quiet and able to keep temperatures in the safe area.

Overall Impression

Arctic Cooling continues their tradition of delivering high quality VGA cooling solutions with this latest incarnation of the Silencer series. The only downside is the limited compatibility which is largely overshadowed though by easiest installation, silent operation and good overall performance. And to top it off this product is widely available from international stores at a fair price of ~€28/$33.

Arctic Cooling Accelero X1

To tame the hottest video cards out there Arctic Cooling has introduced the Accelero series, the X1 for nVidia and X2 for ATI products. It a compact design with heat pipes and copper



Compatibility

The Accelero is made for the high end series of VGA cards, two products split up between ATI and nVidia camps.

The Accelero X1 fits:

Geforce 6800 series

Geforce 7800 series (only PCIe)

Geforce 7900GTX

The 7900GT is missing from the list as its design is different enough to make it incompatible.

As with the Silencer they have a height restriction drawing (.pdf) at their product page.



The design of the Accelero combines 2 heatpipes which run the length of the cooler, with a copper base and aluminum fins. A fan at the top accompanied by a shroud is responsible for moving air over the fins.



The shroud has a small cutout towards the rear-end of the card, this serves the purpose of cooling the extra heatsink found on the GTX series cards.


Installation

The Accelero is held in place by using all the screw holes on the card which are also used by the stock cooling, there is no way this cooler will accidentally drop of the card.



Size wise is it also quite a behemoth compared to the small nVidia cooler



This is the small cut-out on in the shroud which provides airflow over the capacitors at the back of the card



Ready for some performance tests

Inside the system

While the Accelero does stick out a bit at the top end of the card it fits well inside your midi ATX case



Two of them can be installed side by side with place to spare when used in SLI




Test Results

First with the 7800GT at stock speeds:



As with the NV Silencer, changing the fan speed settings did not really impact performance at stock speeds. [note: I plan to re-do these tests to triple verify my findings]

Let’s turn up the heat and overclock




Overall Impression

Arctic Cooling continues their tradition of delivering high quality VGA cooling solutions with this latest incarnation of the Silencer series. The only downside is the limited compatibility but this is largely overshadowed by the easy installation, silent operation and excellent performance. To top it off this product is widely available from international stores at a fair price of ~€28/$33.

Zalman VF900-Cu

Zalman silent computing solutions have evolved with the time also, starting out with passive coolers for VGA cards, they’ve now introduced a heat pipes equipped and actively cooled compact heatsink to cool the high end VGA cards of today.



Compatibility



The VF900-Cu has an impressive compatibility list:

ATI Radeon 9*** Series (except 9550/9600)

ATI Radeon X*** Series

ATI X1300 Series

ATI X1600 Series

ATI X1900 Series

ATI X1800 Series

NVIDIA Geforce4 MX Series

NVIDIA Geforce FX 5200

NVIDIA Geforce FX 5500

NVIDIA Geforce FX 5600(FX 5700)

NVIDIA Geforce FX 5900 Series

NVIDIA Geforce FX 5950 Series

NVIDIA Geforce 6600 Series (except 6600 AGP Series)

NVIDIA Geforce 7900 Series

NVIDIA Geforce 7800 Series (except 7800GS)

NVIDIA Geforce 6800 Series



The VF900-Cu comes with a fan controller which allows you to let the integrated fan spin 1350-2400rpm. The base is very well finished and overall product quality is excellent;




Installation

After you’ve placed the stand offs in the correct mounting holes on the VF900-Cu you push them through the 4 holes around the GPU core and then screw the heatsink in place. A series of small heatsinks which come with double sided tape need to be stuck to the memory chips of the VGA card.



The installation is completely tool less and quite easy once you’ve got the stand offs in the correct holes on the unit.

Inside the system

The VF900-Cu is very compact and you won’t run into any problems fitting your graphics card inside your case with the unit on



SLI is no problem with this cooler



Test Results



With the fan at 12v there is quite a drop in GPU temperature, but the noise level is borderline tolerant; when slowing down to 7v you strike a good balance between noise/performance; for those seeking utter silence the 5v setting will be ideal, below ambient noise level and still acceptable performance.



With an overclocked GPU the VF900-Cu's heatpipes kick into action as the overall lead increases over the stock cooling. Even with the fan at 5v it performs better than the stock cooling at 100%, performance of the compact Zalman unit is impressive!


Overall Impression

Priced at ~€35 this compact VGA cooler from Zalman offers an admirable price/performance/noise balance; whisper quiet operation is easily obtained by reducing the fan’s rotation speed with the included fan controller, while thermal performance surpasses that of the stock heatsink. On of the strengths of this cooler is the wide compatibility, you’ll have a hard time finding a VGA card which does not allow to VF900-CU to be fitted.

Zalman VF700-Cu & FS-V7

The Zalman VF700-Cu is the smaller bother of the VF900-CU, the VF700-Cu resembles the CNPS7x00 series of CPU coolers strongly, a flower design of small fins which are squeezed together in the middle to form the base.

The FS-V7 or also known as the “Fatality” version of the VF700-Cu is not much different from the vanilla version: a different color and slightly faster fan are the features which set it apart.



Compatibility



The VF700-Cu and FS-V7 mounting method allows compatibility with a wide range of VGA cards:

ATI Radeon 9*** Series

ATI Radeon X*** Series

ATI Radeon X1800 Series

NVIDIA Geforce4 MX Series

NVIDIA Geforce FX 5200

NVIDIA Geforce FX 5500

NVIDIA Geforce FX 5600(FX 5700)

NVIDIA Geforce4 Ti 4*** Series

NVIDIA Geforce FX 5700(Ultra) Series

NVIDIA Geforce FX 5800 Series

NVIDIA Geforce FX 5900 Series

NVIDIA Geforce FX 5950 Series

NVIDIA Geforce 6600 Series

NVIDIA Geforce 6800 LE Series

NVIDIA Geforce 6800 Series

NVIDIA Geforce 6800 GT Series

NVIDIA Geforce 6800 Ultra Series

NVIDIA Geforce 6800 Ultra

NVIDIA Geforce 7800 GT series

NVIDIA Geforce 7800 GTX series



Both models come with a 4-pin to 3-pin connector which allows you to run the fan at 12v or 5v.




Installation

A metal bar is attached to the back and fixed to the card using a series of stand offs, afterwards you place the heatsink on top of the GPU and screw it tight using 2 small screws. It takes a bit of time but the different steps to take are not hard to follow and the end result is a secure fix and good contact with the base.

Memory chips are cooled with small aluminum heatsinks, the VF700-Cu has them in blue, the FS-V7 in red.




An excellent and secure fit:

Inside the system

These coolers are low profile so they’ll fit nicely into most systems, the extra addition of LEDs inside the fans make them stand out if you happen to have a window in your side panel.




There is enough room to use them in SLI





Test Results



The first thing I noticed during these tests was that the wattage of the FS-V7 which exceeded the resistance of the small AcoustiFan 3-speed Fan Cable; so at 7v the fan was spinning at the same speed as at 5v, this explains the same temp/dba results for those settings.

Comparing the FS-V7 to the VF700-Cu you can see that the increased fan speed yields a ~3°C drop in temperature but the ~4dBA increase is not quite worth it. At lower voltage the FS-V7 offers a better noise/performance balance, with the stock cooling at 25% performing on par with the VF700-Cu @ 5v.



With an increased heat output the Zalman heatsinks have difficulty keeping the GPU cooler than the stock cooling, the FS-V7 at 12v is on par with the stock cooling at 100% and noise wise the difference is hardly noticeable.

Slowing down the fans put them in the quiet region but thermal performance suffers badly as temperature rise quite quickly now.

Overall Impression

The VF700-Cu has a good price point of ~€25, it offers a better noise/performance ratio than the stock cooling and fits a large variety of VGA cards. The Fatility version, FS-V7, is priced higher, closer to ~€35, which is in the region of the VF900-Cu, however its performance/noise ratio is noticeable lower and I would find it hard to recommend it unless you need a RED Led fan on your VGA cooler.

Sytrin KuFormula VF1 Plus

When Sytrin contacted me for a review of their KuFormula video card cooler I had not heard of the brand name before, but looking at the company’s other products I remember the name “AirCon Cooling system” which is an Air-Condition unit which should help reduce the overall case temperature, using a peltier element the device looked promising but in practice didn’t quite deliver. The VF1 Plus VGA cooler however looks heavy duty and promising from the get go, a solid construction out of copper and using heat pipe technology to further increase heat transfer.



The box proudly states ‘Build Your Own Cooling’ and I can certainly agree with that, although the VF1 Plus ships with its own crossflow fan, the unit also supports 80/92/120mm fans to cool down the heatink, so you’ll have plenty of ways the build the cooling system for your VGA card.



There are two version of the VF1, the vanilla “VF1” lacks the crossflow fan, speed controller and extra memory heatsinks – the Plus version tested here includes those items.

Compatibility



The mounting system of the VF1 is quite flexible as it will allow the heatsink to fit a wide variety of graphics cards:

Geforce MX Series

Geforce Ti4*** Series

Geforce FX**** Series

Geforce 6200 Series

Geforce 6600 Series

Geforce 6800 Series

Geforce 7600GT

Geforce 7800 Series (not BFG 7800 GS AGP)

Radeon 9*** Series (not Asus A9600GE)

Radeon X** Series

Radeon 1*** Series

Installation

The installation starts of with the RAM heatsinks



Followed by sifting through the mounting gear to find those brackets which are needed for installation on the 7800GT



Once mounted on the heatsink the unit can be installed





As you can see the heavy block of copper is bolted down effectively onto the GPU core



Next up is the optional crossflow fan, this needs to be screwed in place onto a separate bracket (which also serves as mounting bracket for the 80/92/120mm optional fan) that has the fan speed control build into the rear of the bracket. The switch can be set to H/M/L.



The motor of is attached to the fan’s housing using anti-vibration rubbers



The fan bracket is mounted separately from the VGA card, here’s an overview of how the crossflow fan will push air through the heatsink’s fins



Ready for some performance tests ->

Inside the system

The heatsink itself is quite compact



However adding the crossflow fan does reduce space inside the case a lot



I doubt if you can use SLI



As mentioned on the previous page, the mounting bracket supports normal fans too, I decided to try the VF1 with a 92mm fan from Arctic Cooling (this one) and a silent 120mm fan, the GlobalWin 1202512L.



The fan is mounted onto the bracket using push-pins and this makes installation very easy, with a 120mm model the target area is only covered by a small part of the fan, while the rest blows air down onto the mainboard and CPU area. With a 92mm fan the airflow is more focused:



The last setup is a custom mount of the 92mm fan straight onto the heatsink, doing so it also removes any doubt if you can use this particular configuration in SLI:



Test Results

Now the interesting part, the performance numbers:



With the crossflow fan at High speed the thermal performance is awesome; no other word can describe it. However the noise generation is quite high and not very tolerable. Reducing the fan speed to medium setting only decreases performance and noise a bit. The “low” setting takes the performance/noise lead; it’s on par performance wise to the “ghetto” mod with the 92mm fan running at 7v but produces less noise according to the dBA meter.

The other fan setups with 92/120mm fans mounted using the included bracket return quite poor temperature results and that at noise levels sometimes higher than the crossflow fan. Those configurations did not allow the VF1 to remain cool enough when overclocked.



At a higher heat output the custom mounted 92mm fan setup offers a better performance/noise ratio than the Crossflow at High / Medium, however the best balance is still the VF1 Plus @ Low, which proved to be cooler than stock cooling while remaining almost dead silent.


Overall Impression

With a competitive price of ~€35 this VF1 Plus cooler from Sytrin delivers quite a price/performance/noise punch to the competition. The build quality is excellent and the mounting system, although a bit more cumbersome with many smaller parts to install, allows the unit to fit most video cards on the market.

The included crossflow fan generates quite a racket at 12v, even causing the case to vibrate, but it delivers extreme performance at this setting. Luckily performance remains impressive when choosing the “low” setting on the included fan controller, which makes the fan dead silent.

The extra fan mounting options, while interesting, did not prove to offer a better performance/noise ratio than the included crossflow fan. Only mounting a 92mm fan directly onto the heatsink (which is not officially supported) keeps the cooling on par.

The only downside to the VF1 Plus is the rather large size of the fan mounting bracket and crossflow fan combo, this construction will effectively prevent you from putting a second VGA card for SLI on some motherboards.

Performance and Noise Overview

The charts are sorted by GPU temperature; please keep a close eye on the yellow bars which represent the noise level.

While the ambient noise was 35.6dBA during tests, the system, when powered on without VGA fan, generated 37.8dBA; if the result of a certain heatsink + fan speed has this value, than it means the noise level was below case ambient, keep this in mind.



The second chart with the VGA card overclocked is a bit smaller because the VF1 with 92/120mm fan did not keep the GPU cool enough, so those entrees are missing:




Closing thoughts

This roundup took quite some time to finish with the different VGA coolers and configurations to test, however I hope that the end result was worth the trouble I went through and gives you an idea of the performance/noise one can expect from the products tested today.

As it currently stands, the Accelero X1 offered the best performance/noise ratio on the 7800GT, however if you are looking for a cooler which offers wider compatibility, the VF1 Plus and Zalman VF900-Cu will make an excellent option (if you are running in SLI, VF1 Plus might pose some issues due to its larger size). The VF700 and FS-V7 are actually last generation products and they can’t quite keep up with the competition, even the stock cooling from nVidia is able to best them.

As mentioned in the introduction, I’m still missing a large name: the Thermalright V1 Ultra arrived too late to be included in this roundup, expect a follow-up review soon where I’ll test it head to head to some of the products tested today.

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Update 25/04/06:: Attentive forum reader ddawson from OC-Forums pointed out that on his system he had troubles fitting two VF900-CU units in SLI. Turns out that the SLI slots on the Asus A8N Premium I'm using for the tests has its two PCIe slots further apart from each other than on other motherboards. ddawson is using a DFI nF4 SLI DR. The MSI SLI boards also seem to have its slots closer to each other. Keep this in mind when deciding which VGA cooler to get, check the dimensions of your motherboard and those of the third party VGA cooling.

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