X-bit labs

Roundup: AeroCool Double Power, Thermaltake DuOrb, Zalman VF1000 LED and a Few Other Good VGA Coolers (page 2)

Category: Coolers

by Sergey Lepilov

[ 02/26/2008 | 04:13 PM ]

Design and Functionality

The cooling system boasts very unusual design. Just take a look yourselves:

AeroCool Double Power consists of two parts - heat-spreader and a heatsink with a fan - that are connected with one another via a single copper heatpipe 6mm in diameter. The heatpipe comes out of the heat-spreader base, loops around the large heatsink and ends in the same base.

The heat-spreader is made of solid aluminum and features thin short ribbing:

The heatpipe transfers the heat to the main heatsink with a fan:

This unique construction determines the cooler’s unusually large size of 178 x 120 x 47.5mm. However, the use of solid aluminum (except for only one copper heatpipe) allowed making it only 210g big. I would like to point out right away that AeroCool Double Power is the lightest cooler of all our today’s testing participants.

90-mm fan should cool down the heatsink rib array hanging on the heatpipes and a solid base. Although I personally couldn’t figure out why there is no perforation in the base, because in this case the airflow created by the cooler fan could be directly right to the graphics card PCB:

The fan rotation speed should vary from ~2000RPM to ~3000RPM, however, our monitoring data reported the minimum fan rotation speed of 1920RPM, and maximum – of 2970RPM.

The aluminum surface of the cooler base if finished OK:

Here you can also notice the universal retention panels that attach to the graphics card. The list of graphics cards compatible with AeroCool Double Power cooler is pretty long and is available in the specification chart in this article. I would like to say though that you will not be able to install this cooler onto Radeon HD 2900 XT, because its base will sit on the metal frame around the graphics processor and there will be no contact with the GPU itself. However, this is not a serious drawback because these graphics cards have already been discontinued and haven’t become overclockers’ favorite anyway.