X-bit labs

New VGA Coolers from Zalman and Gigabyte: Zalman VNF100 and Gigabyte V-Power Review (page 5)

Category: Coolers

by Sergey Lepilov

[ 07/31/2007 | 05:43 PM ]

Design

Looks very beautiful, doesn’t it? The cooler is built on a copper base with four copper heatpipes coming out of it in pairs in two opposite directions to the aluminum heatsink halves. In the center of the heatsink there is a 90mm fan, according to the specification (the fan blades from a 92mm fan, actually). This fan features read LED lighting.

The system is covered with a meshed plastic casing:

Gigabyte V-Power is 186x105x34mm in size. It is designed to cool down AMD (ATI) Radeon X1800, X1900, X1950 series and Nvidia GeForce 6800, 7800, 7900 (7950) series graphics cards including CrossFire and SLI configurations. Theoretically, Gigabyte V-Power can fit onto any graphics card with four mounting holes and diagonal distance of 75mm between them. For example, I could easily install this cooler onto GeForce 8600 GTS based on the reference design that wasn’t even mentioned in the compatibility list.

If we remove the plastic casing and take down the fan, the system heatsink will look as follows:

The gaps in the side and top parts of the heatsink let the airflow cool the PCB and the memory chips of the graphics card freely. Note that aluminum heatsinks sitting on each pair of copper heatpipes are pretty small, although there is enough room to actually make them bigger. The weight of this cooling system is not mentioned in the specs, but subjectively it weighs around 300g.

The fan on Gigabyte V-Power is made by Everflow:

The rotation speed of this fan may be adjusted in the interval from 0 to 2000rpm with the help of the controller that comes with the cooler. The maximum level of generated noise is claimed to be 25dBA. Thanks to the frictionless bearing, Gigabyte can claim the MTBF of 40,000 hours (which is over 4.5 years of continuous operation).

The copper base is covered with protective paper sticker warning you that it needs to be removed before installation:

The base finish quality leaves much to be desired, as you can see:

However, its evenness is beyond any criticism.