by Sergey Lepilov
03/04/2008 | 04:44 PM
Since there is still no competitive single-chip solution in the upper price segment of the market, the reign of Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX/Ultra graphics solutions goes on. And it has been on for so long already that Nvidia Company didn’t think of anything better than discontinuing their production and replacing them with new GeForce 8800 GTX 512MB with lower production costs. The new solution turned out a success, but is still slower than GeForce 8800 GTX/Ultra in high resolutions and quality graphics modes that is why the owners of the most expensive graphics cards out there have nothing to worry about just yet.
However, what they do need to worry about, is the thermal readings of their GeForce 8800 GTX/Ultra based graphics cards. Of course, things are not as bad here as with AMD Radeon HD 2900 XT/XTX, but we can’t deny that there are some problems with high graphics processor and graphics card temperatures here. As soon as corresponding water-cooling units appeared among the solutions from well-known liquid-cooling systems makers, the liquid-cooling systems fans managed to solve this problem once and for all. However, those users who didn’t have a liquid-cooling system available, didn’t have that much of a choice for their graphics accelerators in the air-cooling segment. In fact, there was hardly any choice at all, except the recently announced Thermalright HR-03 Plus. Although GeForce 8800 GTX/Ultra based graphics cards should leave the market pretty soon, our today’s article will try to introduce to you a few more choices for graphics solutions of this type. We would like you to meet two new powerful VGA air-coolers from APACK and Arctic Cooling.
The Korean APACK Company and their ZEROtherm brand are hardly known in the European market, however in the US their solutions are taking the leading positions. There were times when we didn’t know anything about Scythe coolers, but today their name is associated with such successful solutions as Infinity and Anniversary Ninja Copper. Our today’ article is going to introduce to you for the first time on Xbit Labs APACK ZEROtherm solutions. We have received the entire line-up of their cooling products for tests, and we are going to open a series of reviews devoted to them with a universal graphics card cooling solution - ZEROtherm Hurricane HC92 Cu 8800.
Compact package with a convenient plastic carry handle is designed in shiny silver color and looks very beautiful:
There is a cut out window in the front of the box showing the cooler front with nine icons on the left of it depicting the key features of this cooling system. One of them promises that Hurricane HC92 Cu 8800 will deliver “killer performance”. In the upper left corner of the box front there is a band stating that this cooler is optimized specifically for Nvidia GeForce 8800 graphics card series.
The reverse side of the box is completely filled with info:
Here you can find the detailed technical specifications, the list of compatible graphics accelerators, the graph showing the level of generated noise depending on the fan rotation speed and even a diagram comparing Hurricane HC92 Cu 8800 cooling efficiency against that of reference coolers from GeForce 8600 GTS, Radeon X1900XTX and GeForce 8800. To cut the long story short, you don’t really need a review any more if you have read the back of the cooler box :)
Inside the carton box there is a transparent plastic casing with tightly closed cover with the cooler in one section and accessories in the other:
Hurricane HC92 Cu 8800 comes bundled with the following items:
The new ZEROtherm cooler looks very stylish and even a little futuristic:
The whole thing is covered with silver plastic casing with original grid above the fan. The cooler measures 169.7 x 97.1 x 54.4mm and weighs 372g.
When we turn Hurricane HC92 Cu 8800 upside down we can see that it is made of solid copper:
The only exception is the aluminum cooler retention frame that sits above the heatpipes and doesn’t have any effect on the cooling efficiency of this solution.
So, the cooler is based on four copper heatpipes 6mm in diameter that come out of a solid copper base. The heatpipes hold two sections of thin copper plates totaling 52. The whole thing is covered with a plastic casing that serves not only decorative purposes but also directs the airflow to the graphics card PCB components. This casing can be easily removed (you should only take out four screws) to get access to the fan:
The manufacturer recommends using Hurricane HC92 Cu 8800 stripped down like this on overclocked graphics cards. Moreover, this cooler can also be used in passive mode, i.e. without a fan, on graphics cards with low heat dissipation (the fan can be removed also very easily). Here I have to point out that the manufacturer claims the cooler in passive mode is good up to GeForce 8600 GT.
Hurricane HC92 Cu 8800 is equipped with a seven-blade fan 92x25mm that is attached to the heatsink at a small angle. The fan rotation speed of this fan may vary from 1500RPM to ~3300RPM (±10%) thanks to the enclosed fan rotation speed controller unit. The level of generated noise in this case will vary from 19dBA to 40dBA, and the airflow - between 26.8-57.7CFM. The guaranteed mean time before failure for the fan with a mysterious “UFO Bearing” is 40,000 hours or about 4.5 years of non-stop operation. Not bad at all.
The cooler is 54.4mm thick and when it is installed onto a graphics card, you will not be able to use the next two mainboard slots:
The cooler base is covered with a protective sticky film warning you to remove it before installation. The cooler base seems to be polished, but you can still see machine tracks on it:
Although the cooler name has “8800” in it, which indicates clearly what solutions this cooler is designed for, Hurricane HC92 Cu 8800 is a universal cooler compatible with all contemporary graphics cards. Just check out the cooler installation manual to confirm:
Although AMD Radeon HD 3850 and 3870 are missing from this list, the cooler fits them perfectly, which we have specifically double-checked. There is a special part in the manual that lists the incompatible graphics cards. Among them are Matrox solutions (do you still remember those?), NVIDIA PCX 5xxx series, GeForce 6600/7600/7900 AGP and ATI Radeon 2900/9550/9600. It seems like a pretty long list, however, all these graphics cards are out-dated already.
The cooler is installed quickly and easily. First you have to insert the appropriate threaded spindles into the corresponding retention holes on the cooler retention frame:
Then apply a thin layer of thermal grease to the GPU surface, install the graphics card on top of the cooler and tighten then together with spring nuts at the bottom of the graphics card PCB:
This is what ZEROtherm Hurricane HC92 Cu 8800 looks like when installed onto a GeForce 8800 GTX:
By the way, in this case you need to install the aluminum heatsink on top of the NVIO chip (the green heatsink on the photo). Besides, you have to stick small heatsinks onto the power elements and graphics memory chips.
This is what the whole thing looks like inside a system case:
As I have already mentioned before, the cooling system blocks two mainboard slots next to the graphics card. Once the graphics card is installed into the system case, all you need to do is place the fan rotation speed controller in a convenient spot, connect it to the fan and then you will be able to enjoy the four blue fan LED’s:
In conclusion I would only like to add that the recommended retail price of ZEROtherm Hurricane HC92 Cu 8800 is $39. We will check out the cooling efficiency of this solution in the corresponding section of our review. And now it is time to meet another new “extreme” cooler from Arctic Cooling.
Better late than never, but this is exactly what we can say about the arrival of Arctic Cooling Accelero Xtreme solutions to the market. The thing is that they have been working on these cooling solutions for so long that the graphics cards they have been primarily designed for, namely AMD Radeon X2900 XT and Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX, are already discontinued. However, the manufacturer claims that Accelero Xtreme 8800 cooler should also fit for GeForce 8800 GT and GTS based graphics cards and will remain quite demanded in the market for a while. Besides, those GeForce 8800 GTX owners who haven’t yet replaced their reference cooler with anything more advanced, may find this new solution extremely interesting. So, we couldn’t miss the opportunity to introduce this product to you on our site and check out its practical cooling efficiency.
The large plastic packaging is all transparent that is why you can see the entire cooler:
The front side of the box says that the new cooler is targeted solely for computer enthusiasts, overclocking fans and hardcore gamers and can ensure up to 20ºC thermal advantage over the reference GeForce 8800 GTX/GTS cooling system. The reverse side of the package is designed in Arctic Cooling’s traditional manner offering you the detailed report on this product including efficiency diagram, noise level chart, technical specifications and even Accelero Xtreme design description:
At the bottom of the box you can find all bundled accessories:
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.
Before installing the cooler onto a graphics card you should stick the adhesive thermal pads to memory chips and NVIO micro-chip:
Then you stick aluminum heatsinks on voltage regulator elements and install the cooler. it should be tightened with 6 screws at the bottom of the card:
The heatpipes leading from the smaller heatsink stand out by approximately 2mm past the PCB edge of the GeForce 8800 GTX graphics card that is why those of you who have this card installed right against the HDD chassis should keep it in mind:
After that all you need to do is to connect the four-pin power cable to the standard GeForce 8800 series power connector…
… and then install the complete system into the mainboard:
If you have enough room inside your system case for a GeForce 8800 GTX graphics card, then you should have no problems fitting the Arctic Cooling Accelero Xtreme 8800 solution there as well (just keep in mind those 2mm we pointed out above). You will have to give up two mainboard slots next to the graphics card. You may even have problems installing an expansion card into the third slot, because in this case you will block the airflow to the first two fans of the Accelero Xtreme cooler.
The new cooling solution is priced at about $48.
Now let’s check out the technical specs of the new solutions side by side using the following table:
As you may have already understood from the technical specification table, our today’s testing participants will be competing not only against the reference graphics card cooler, but also against the highly efficient third-party solution. It is Thermalright HR-03 Plus, which was installed on the front side of the graphics card and featured a 120x25mm Cooler Master fan with ~1200RPM rotation speed.
One of the leaders of our previous test session – Arctic Cooling Accelero S1 – cannot be installed onto GeForce 8800 GTX that is why it is missing in this test session.
The participants of today’s performance session were tested only in a closed system case with the following configuration:
Our quad-core processor was moderately overclocked from its nominal frequency to 3.8GHz with the Vcore increased to 1.45V. DDR2 SDRAM worked at 940MHz with 2.175V voltage.
The testing programs were installed under Windows XP Professional Edition SP2. We used DirectX 9.0c libraries, and ForceWare 171.16 drivers.
The graphics card was loaded up by running 3DMark06’s Firefly Forest synthetic test ten times in 1920x1200 with 16x anisotropic filtering and 4x FSAA activated. We overclocked the graphics card and then monitored its temperatures using RivaTuner v2.0.6 utility. We performed at least two test cycles for each cooler and waited for 10-15 minutes for the temperature to stabilize between each test cycle. The ambient temperature remained at ~25°C during the tests and is used as a starting point on our results charts.
The noise level of each cooler was measured according to our traditional method using CENTER-321 electronic noise meter. The subjectively comfortable level of ~34.5dBA is marked with a blue dotted line in the diagrams; the ambient noise from the system case including a processor cooler didn’t exceed ~33.2dBA measured at a 1m distance.
XFX GeForce 8800 GTX GDDR3 768MB graphics card that will be used for our today’s tests is equipped with a reference cooler by default:
With this cooling solution we managed to overclock the card to 612/1566/2052MHz frequencies (shader GPU unit was overclocked independently of the main one):
This way we lacked some 100MHz for the memory speed to hit the standard frequencies of a GeForce 8800 Ultra graphics card.
The cooling efficiency diagram shows the coolers lined up in a descending order for the graphics processor temperature (GPU Temp) and ambient temperature (Ambient Temp) under maximum workload. Here are the results:
The results speak for themselves. Despite our hopes, ZEROtherm Hurricane HC92 Cu 8800 in its quietest operational mode failed to outperform the reference GeForce 8800 GTX cooling system. However, at the maximum rotation speed of its fan the ZEROtherm cooler proves more efficient than the reference solution although it also generates more noise. The manufacturer’s recommended “overclocker” mode when the cooler is working without the plastic casing, didn’t provide the desired effect. It would be more correct to say that there was simply no effect whatsoever compared with the standard Hurricane HC92 Cu 8800 operational mode. We didn’t check out the cooler performance in passive mode for understandable reasons.
However the second testing participant, Arctic Cooling Accelero Xtreme 8800 mega-cooler looked simply amazing. Although we think it would be silly to expect anything less from a cooling solution of that size. In terms of efficiency this cooler can be compared with Thermalright HR-03 Plus when running a very quiet although not completely silent operational mode. Note that Thermalright cooler is running with a 120mm fan instead of a 92mm one and takes much more room inside a system case than Accelero Xtreme 8800 and even costs more even without the price of a fan taken into account. The advantages of the new Arctic Cooling solution are indisputable. If the provided cooling efficiency is still not enough for your needs, just speed up the fans of Accelero Xtreme 8800 and the today’s most powerful graphics card will drop to pretty moderate thermal mode and the overall thermal advantage for the GPU under maximum workload will hit 21ºC over the GeForce 8800 GTX reference cooling system. However, there is still one problem here: all warm air stays inside the system case.
Now let’s check out the results of our noise measurements:
I just wanted to point out that all three testing participants generate very little noise. The only exceptions are the fan of the reference cooler at maximum rotation speed of 2900RPM and a 92mm fan of ZEROtherm Hurricane HC92 Cu 8800 at its maximum speed of 3120RPM. All other cooling systems are either extremely close to the subjective comfort line or below it.
We will start summing up our results from the ZEROtherm solutions. Although the Hurricane HC92 Cu 8800 bears the “8800” in its name, it failed to cope with the most powerful graphics card from this family, unfortunately. It is unacceptable for a cooler these days to be just a little better than a reference solution, because you end up paying additional money for it. Of course, being as efficient as the stock cooler Hurricane HC92 Cu 8800 works quieter, looks much more stylish, boasts modding fan highlighting and finally is a universal solution, which makes it fit not only for GeForce 8800 GTX but also for other graphics cards. Compared with the other two solutions for high-end graphics cards, ZEROtherm Hurricane HC92 Cu 8800 doesn’t really win, although costs much less.
Arctic Cooling Accelero Xtreme 8800, on the contrary, proved an excellent cooler in terms of efficiency as well as low level of generated noise. There is only one worthy rival to the new cooler these days: Thermalright HR-03 Plus. However, the latter equipped with a 120mm fan will eat up one extra PCI slot off your mainboard, costs a bit more and still is a little less efficient. In fact, Accelero Xtreme 8800 is the today’s absolute best cooler for GeForce 8800 GTX. However, we can’t help pointing out two drawbacks that are closely connected with one another. The cooler is not a universal solution, and GeForce 8800 GTX and GTS graphics cards are being discontinued giving way to a young but ambitious GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB and a cheaper GeForce 8800 GT. I don’t know about the latter, but we failed to install Accelero Xtreme 8800 onto the reference GeForce 8800 HTS 512MB from LeadTek, to our greatest disappointment (the main heatsink is too long and hits against the grid next to the card connectors). So, it is definitely a great cooler but it came out a little later for ultimate success. Hopefully, the new Arctic Cooling solution will fit onto the upcoming GeForce 98800 GX2.
According to the results of our test session we decided to award Arctic Cooling Accelero Xtreme 8800 with our prestigious Editor’s Choice title as the best cooler for GeForce 8800 GTX graphics cards.
