X-bit labs

Two New Coolers for Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX or Minus 20 Degrees for the Reference (page 5)

Category: Coolers

by Sergey Lepilov

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

Design and Functionality

The cooler makes a truly stunning first impression. It measures 256 x 88 x 21mm and weighs 440g! In fact, the cooler is so big that it covers the front of such a long graphics card as Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX completely:

Three 80x15mm fans with rotation speed between ~1500~2000RPM and a PWM controller cover the entire cooler heatsink. The latter represents an array of 107 thin aluminum plates and consists of two parts:

6mm heatpipes pierce both parts of the heatsink:

There are total five heatpipes that come out of the copper cooler base:

Three heatpipes go along the entire base of the larger heatsink and hold the smaller heatsink, too:

Two other heatpipes pierce the main heatsink in its upper part:

Note that the main heatsink is also equipped with an aluminum pad that should contact with graphics card memory chips and NVIO micro-chip. The small heatsink, on the contrary, is not solid, so that the airflow can go freely to the PCB power elements.

Copper cooler base already has pre-applied MX-2 thermal grease, which is a worthy rival in terms of quality to Arctic Silver 5:

Since all coolers were previously tested with Arctic Silver 5 thermal grease, we had to remove MX-2 from the base. But before we did it, we checked out how efficient it was. Our tests showed that it was as good as Arctic Silver 5, even 1ºC better, which may on the other hand be considered within acceptable measuring error. When we removed the thermal compound, we saw that the cooler base was not polished at all.