Thermal Performance

Here are the results we obtained summed up on a diagram for your convenience:

In idle mode Thermaltake CL-G0003 yields to the reference ATI cooler by about 3^oC, however, once at least some additional air flow is involved, it wins back these 3^oC and even gets 4^oC cooler: the large heat dissipating surface tells. The Thermaltake cooler loses the same way to the reference ATI solution in 3DMark05 and Half-Life 2, however, we can see it lagging behind only in passive mode. If there is at least a weak airflow around the heatsink, CL-G0003 turns incredibly efficient. It manages to win 14^oC in 3DMark05 and the whole 16^oC in Half-Life 2!

This is an excellent result, keeping in mind that this is a practically noiseless solution. You will be able to obtain this great performance in a case with active airflow inside, such as Chieftec BX/Dragon case, for instance, or any other system case where you could install an additional fan next to the expansion cards. In passive mode the results are not so encouraging, although the cooler still does its job not bad at all, at least for the RADEON X800 XL/X700 PRO/GeForce 6600 GT type of graphics accelerators. And of course, it will be just perfect with any graphics adapter based on a less powerful and less “hot” GPU.