Hardware and cooling matters have always been inseparable. No modern chips have zero heat dissipation.

If we make a list of PC components according to their heating, CPUs will surely be at the top of the list - nowadays they can generate dozens of watts. For stable work CPUs need to have their core thoroughly cooled. Today there exist good many coolers of different types, color, size and design. However, these are not only CPUs that we'd include in the list. Here also come hard disk drives and CD-ROM drives, mainboards and graphics cards.

We guess, graphics cards will occupy far not the last line. Moreover, if we recall the favorite past-time of most PC-addicted guys (of course, it's overclocking), adequate cooling for graphics cards will seem even more topical to us.

This review dwells on all sorts of graphics card coolers. As ever more devices of the kind appear on the market, we keep asking ourselves whether all of the novelties are really needed and which of them would be the right choice. These are the questions we'll try to answer today.

Silence, Overclocking and Aesthetics

In most cases, you won't need anything else but a standard cooler, which is originally installed onto your graphics card. The only thing you may have to do is to remove the default thermal pad and fix the cooler on a layer of thermal paste. Or you may simply add some paste under the cooler feeling sorry for the poor manufacturers who are forced to save even on this stuff ;)

Well, standard coolers sometimes fail to cope with their duties. When can it happen?

• First of all, it may happen when you overclock the card. In this case extra cooling is vital, as "nominal" coolers are not designed to work in extreme conditions.
• Secondly, the noise produced by standard cooling system can make you think of a less noisy cooler.
• Thirdly, your standard cooler can be wrecked and you'll have to look for a substitute.
• Finally, someone may have purely aesthetic grounds to buy a new cooler - Blue Orb or Thermaltake look naturally nicer than some small black shapeless stuff, which is to be found on most graphics cards :)

We won't risk giving any comments on the last point - it is too individual. Let us better discuss the first three cases.

Things stand the simplest with overclocking: the only requirement for a cooler is to be as efficient as possible. Perhaps, you'd also like it to be not too noisy.

Indeed, the noise produced by more than one cooler in the system is one of the main problems you'll encounter.

As for us, we solved this problem in a radical way. All coolers in our home PCs are "kept hungry": they get 7V instead of 12V and do not roar any longer. Now we enjoy piece listening their somnolent murmuring.

We recommend lower powering for graphics card coolers as well. This is no harder than to do the same with the cooling system installed on the CPU. All you need is a slightly modified PCPlug-to-Molex adapter. That's what it should look like:

PCPlug-to-Molex Converter		Modified Converter

After the modification your cooler will become a trifle less efficient, but it will turn less noisy as well. We believe, this is an advisable way out.

Now let us have a look at the coolers you may install on your graphics card instead of the standard device:

Testing Participants

Thermaltake Blue Orb

          

It is a classical cooler. It came into being long ago and gained worldwide popularity. However, from our point of view this cooling system has an odd design: its ribs, foot and core to which the fan is attached are three separate aluminum units.

This is no good for heat dissipation, though it all depends on how well the units are pressed together. Later we'll have a chance to compare this construction with the other six ones.

Thermaltake Orange Orb

          

The idea in Blue Orb and Orange Orb is the same, but implementation differs. The latter has a solid heatsink, its ribs are 1.5 times smaller but their cross-section is longer, so this cooler can wind the surface as vast as Blue Orb. Since Orange Orb is shorter, we can recommend it to those whose PC case is too small for a standard-sized cooler.

The only reason why Orange Orb may turn out less efficient than Blue Orb is its weaker fan.

Thermaltake Crystal Orb

          

This one is really good-looking, isn't it? Like Orange Orb, Crystal Orb has a solid heatsink. But this model has a copper heatsink, which is covered with nickel for the sake of more stylish outlook.

The impeller of Crystal Orb has a metal covering with Thermaltake logo cut out in it and several openings for the airflow along the edges. We do not know whether this cover is really necessary, since it balks the airflow and makes the cooler noisier, but it's definitely pretty :).

Please, be careful with this cover in order not to displace it. We happened to press it against the impeller during installation. You know, Thermaltake can be proud of its cooler: the fan with a blocked impeller didn't get wrecked over those five minutes that we tried to figure out why the graphics card had got overheated.

Titan TTC-CUVIAB

          

Here is a nice-looking cooler from good old Titan. It has a copper heatsink, so in spite of its modest size, this cooler is supposed to be quite enough for a graphics chip. The main advantage of this cooler is that its elastic clip ensures perfect clamping to the chip.

We liked the cooler's outlook when we saw it on the shelf, but when it came to installation the cooler perplexed us. You see, Titan TTC-CUVIAB is suggested to be assembled on the spot. All components are neatly packed, each in its own package: heatsink, fan, clips, fix pins and so on. An extra point is tiny screws needed to fix the fan. But the trouble is that there is no threading in the heatsink openings, which in their turn are much narrower than the screws. Worse still, the screws are no cutters - these are just common screws with standard threading. Thus, you should either learn to cut tiny threading or tie the fan to the heatsink with threads...

We turned upside-down our personal cooler storage and finally dug out suitable screws, but we doubt you'd love to take the same pains.

Titan TTC-CSC11

          

This cooler from Titan has the same shape as the previous model, but it is equipped with an aluminum heatsink. Its fan and heatsink are colored gold, so the construction has a toy-like outlook.

TTC-CSC11 has no clip. There is a sticky pad instead. It tells negatively on heat dissipation, because most NVIDIA chips have a slightly concave surface. The gap above the chip center is normally filled with thermal paste, but with the pad it remains hollow.

The only pleasant thing about this model is that you won't have to assemble it screw-by-screw like in case of Titan TTC-CUVIAB.

Titan TTC-CSC12

          

Titan TTC-CSC12 looks like a gold plaything too. The openings on the heatsink foot provoke even more doubts about its workability: heat dissipation from the foot to the ribs is gravely hampered. In short, we won't be surprised to see this cooler have the worst result in our testing.

Titan TTC-MV1AB

          

This is the largest graphics card cooler from Titan. Its construction is a mix of Thermaltake Blue Orb and Orange Orb. The first of them has a heatsink of a similar shape, but the heatsink of TTC-MV1AB is solid like that of Orange Orb. We liked this cooler for its thick foot and big cooled surface - its ribs are higher than those of Blue Orb.

Sadly, these advantages are spoilt by a number of drawbacks. First of all, this cooler has no "ears" that serve to fix the cooler on the card with pins. Instead, it is supposed to be fixed with a sticky thermal pad, which actually ruins the cooler's advantages. The pad is a lot less efficient than regular thermal paste, especially if the graphics chip surface is not absolutely flat.

Standard cooler on VisionTek Xtasy 6564

          

Here is a standard cooler you can see on most graphics cards. In spite of its small size, it cools a pretty large surface, while the fan works at a really high rotation speed (over 7000rpm). At the same time, this is a noisy device, which is untypical for the other coolers we've reviewed. In terms of noisiness only Thermaltake Crystal Orb, Blue Orb and Titan TTC-MV1AB are comparable to this cooler.

Testbed and Methods

We tested all the above-described coolers on VisionTek Xtasy 6564 graphics card based on NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti200. For each cooler we warmed up the card for about 30 minutes in 3DMark2001 and then checked the temperature and fan rotation speed.

We checked the temperature on the spot on the rear side of the graphics card opposite the graphics core.

These temperature values do not coincide with the real temperature of the chip and are strongly influenced by the test conditions (type of PC case, room temperature and such-like). But our aim was not to define the exact temperature of the graphics core in the same conditions. We just wanted to compare the efficiency of the coolers tested. For this purpose we provided similar external conditions for all coolers and gauged the temperature. These values were quite enough to make a rating list for all tested models.

To measure the fan rotation speed we took an optical tachometer and an infrared thermometer to check the temperature.

We tested each cooler in both standard (12V) and "silent" mode (7V).

The graphics card also worked in two modes: standard (175MHz/400MHz of core/memory frequency) and overclocked (240MHz/500MHz).

Performance

That's what we obtained with the graphics card working in a standard mode:

Thermaltake Crystal Orb is the best. In general, coolers from Thermaltake have proven more efficient than the standard cooling system, while the Titan team appeared a failure. The main reason for the failure is the thermal pads used as a thermal interface. For instance, in spite of its smaller size Titan TTC-CUV1AB has turned out the best in the team. It overran a more powerful TTC-MV1AB with a thermal pad. As we have already written, pads cannot ensure tight enough contact between the cooler foot and graphics chip. Just have a look at the trace that remained on the pad after we had removed it from the core.

Can you expect high efficiency from a cooler which touches only the edges of the graphics chip core and its center hangs in the air?

As we lowered the coolers' voltage down to 7V, the temperature didn't increase much. We guess, 5 degrees of temperature increase are a reasonable pay for considerable noise reduction.

During extreme oveclocking, the graphics core turns hotter due to higher Vcore and clock frequency increase. As a result, the temperature grows notably higher:

The leaders in this test are Thermaltake Crystal Orb, Orange Orb and Blue Orb. Though heat dissipation has increased, there is almost the same gap between the best and worst results. The rating is nearly the same too. Only the copper Titan TTC-CUV1AB now runs ahead of the standard VisionTek cooler.

Like it happened last time, lower voltage (7V) caused just a slight temperature increase.

As the voltage gets lower, different coolers suffer different rotation speed losses.

The standard cooler is the fastest, but its rotation speed fell the heaviest as we decreased the voltage. On average, the coolers' rotation speed sank 1.5 times. Judging by the temperature reading, the voltage drop is not that great (unlike noise reduction - when the coolers were powered at 7V we could hardly hear them working).

Conclusion

According to our tests, Thermaltake makes the most efficient graphics card coolers. It offers a wide range of models, so they are sure to match every taste. These coolers are good for extreme overclocking, as they secure the minimum growth of the graphics core temperature.

In the Titan family TTC-CUV1AB is the best, but it is no more efficient than the standard cooler. It makes no sense to use it with chips of NVIDIA GeForce3 class. On the other hand, coolers from Titan are rather cheap, and for those who do not overclock their cards but only look for a substitute to a standard cooler high efficiency is not of crucial importance.

When graphics card coolers are powered at a lower voltage of 7V, their efficiency falls only negligibly. So, this counter-noise measure is a wise way out. There is just one note to make: it makes no sense to fight you cooler's noise this way before you minimize the noise produced by the other devices.

Sticky thermal pad is reasonable to use only if there is no other possibility to fix the cooler on the graphics core.

This may occur with some graphics cards from ATI or some other cards that have no openings serving to fix the cooler with pins. But even in this case we'd advise you to use special thermal glue like AlSil-5 instead of a thermal pad.

Good luck to overclockers and piece to noise martyrs!