X-bit labs

Two New Coolers for Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX or Minus 20 Degrees for the Reference (page 2)

Category: Coolers

by Sergey Lepilov

[ 03/04/2008 | 04:44 PM ]

Design and Fucntionality

The new ZEROtherm cooler looks very stylish and even a little futuristic:

The whole thing is covered with silver plastic casing with original grid above the fan. The cooler measures 169.7 x 97.1 x 54.4mm and weighs 372g.

When we turn Hurricane HC92 Cu 8800 upside down we can see that it is made of solid copper:

The only exception is the aluminum cooler retention frame that sits above the heatpipes and doesn’t have any effect on the cooling efficiency of this solution.

So, the cooler is based on four copper heatpipes 6mm in diameter that come out of a solid copper base. The heatpipes hold two sections of thin copper plates totaling 52. The whole thing is covered with a plastic casing that serves not only decorative purposes but also directs the airflow to the graphics card PCB components. This casing can be easily removed (you should only take out four screws) to get access to the fan:

The manufacturer recommends using Hurricane HC92 Cu 8800 stripped down like this on overclocked graphics cards. Moreover, this cooler can also be used in passive mode, i.e. without a fan, on graphics cards with low heat dissipation (the fan can be removed also very easily). Here I have to point out that the manufacturer claims the cooler in passive mode is good up to GeForce 8600 GT.

Hurricane HC92 Cu 8800 is equipped with a seven-blade fan 92x25mm that is attached to the heatsink at a small angle. The fan rotation speed of this fan may vary from 1500RPM to ~3300RPM (±10%) thanks to the enclosed fan rotation speed controller unit. The level of generated noise in this case will vary from 19dBA to 40dBA, and the airflow - between 26.8-57.7CFM. The guaranteed mean time before failure for the fan with a mysterious “UFO Bearing” is 40,000 hours or about 4.5 years of non-stop operation. Not bad at all.

The cooler is 54.4mm thick and when it is installed onto a graphics card, you will not be able to use the next two mainboard slots:

The cooler base is covered with a protective sticky film warning you to remove it before installation. The cooler base seems to be polished, but you can still see machine tracks on it:

Although the cooler name has “8800” in it, which indicates clearly what solutions this cooler is designed for, Hurricane HC92 Cu 8800 is a universal cooler compatible with all contemporary graphics cards. Just check out the cooler installation manual to confirm:

Although AMD Radeon HD 3850 and 3870 are missing from this list, the cooler fits them perfectly, which we have specifically double-checked. There is a special part in the manual that lists the incompatible graphics cards. Among them are Matrox solutions (do you still remember those?), NVIDIA PCX 5xxx series, GeForce 6600/7600/7900 AGP and ATI Radeon 2900/9550/9600. It seems like a pretty long list, however, all these graphics cards are out-dated already.