X-bit labs

Roundup: AeroCool Double Power, Thermaltake DuOrb, Zalman VF1000 LED and a Few Other Good VGA Coolers (page 3)

Category: Coolers

by Sergey Lepilov

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

Installation Tips

The cooler installation is a very simple procedure. First you have to screw in four spindles into the corresponding holes in the graphics card PCB locking them with small screw-nuts on the front side. Then you install the cooler on top of them and tighten it with spring screws:

This retention is very reliable, the cooler will not be moving around the chip surface. This is what it looks like when installed onto Radeon HD 3870:

You can see clearly that the main heatsink with a fan is hanging above the power part of the PCB, so the holes in the base could have really helped cool this part of the PCB really efficiently.

When installed onto a Radeon HD 3870 graphics card the cooler heatsink gets 4cm past the top side of the PCB and 1.5cm past the back side of it. Note that these numbers may vary on different graphics cards, because they depend on the PCB layout.

When the card with AeroCool Double Power is inside the system case, the picture may not be too rosy either:

In a standard ASUS ASCOT 6AR2-B ATX case. The heatsink unit with the fan hits against the hard disk drive and blocks completely two slots right next to it on Asus P5K Deluxe mainboard. Although you will still be able to fit a short modem or a sound card into the second slot from the PCI-E one.

The fan features white lighting:

It looks very nice in the dark.

AeroCool Double Power is priced relatively high and sells for $45, which seems a little unjustified because it is made of aluminum.