Cooling System Design

The EN7800GTX TOP graphics card was equipped with a slightly improved version of the Arctic Cooling NV Silencer 5 cooler. Here, ASUS has put its own cooler on the EAX1800XT TOP, although Arctic Cooling has something to do with it, too. At least the fan is actually made by Arctic Cooling.

This time the cooler incorporates heat pipes. These pipes take heat away from the copper sole that contacts directly with the GPU die and distribute it uniformly in the heatsink made up of thin aluminum ribs. The use of heat pipes helped make the copper foundation thinner and thus minimize the overall weight of the cooler.

The airflow created by the blower goes through the heatsink and to the back of the PCB, also cooling the heatsink on the MOSFETs. The air-directing casing is made of black plastic and has a mirror insert with an ASUS logo that shimmers with all the colors of the rainbow. Thick dark-gray thermal paste is placed between the heatsink’s sole and the GPU whereas the memory chips make contact with the cooler sole via thick elastic pads of some rubber-like material.

This cooling system resembles the Accelero X2 cooler in design, which points at its developer, Arctic Cooling, who created this solution for ASUS. We don’t know if ceramic or fluid bearings are used in the fan, but the main advantage of Arctic Cooling fans has always been their very low level of noise, so we can expect the ASUS EAX1800XT TOP to be very quiet, too.