Evercool Nighthawk VC-F117 - Testing: P4 478 vs VC F117

To measure the temperature, I used two hardware sensors connected to an AeroGate fan controller/temperature sensor. I would not trust software temps, so I wanted hard proof.

Here are the connections and how they were attached. One was directly on the back of the card dead center behind the GPU, the other right on top of one of the memory chips.

All temperatures were measured twice: at Idle and while playing UT2K4. The card was clocked up to 290MHz GPU and 586 MHz memory.

Here are the temperatures:

So the new heatsink is better? Definitely. I would attribute lower temps to the new piece being made out of copper, thus having better heat conductivity, which works!

But the new memory heatsinks are relatively useless. With the VC-F117 installed, I stopped playing UT because memory temp kept climbing. The larger, old ones could not go back on the card, since the F117 heatsink lays too close to the card.

So it’s a tradeoff, until I find better RAMsinks. When the card was clocked down to stock frequencies of 250MHZ/513MHZ, the memory temperature dropped to 46C, which is ok, but isn’t the purpose of having this cooling solution to do some serious overclocking? So if overclocking with this cooler, keep in mind you may need to invest in some small, effective memory heatsinks separately.

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