Zalman ZM80C-HP VGA Cooler - In the Box page 2
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Zalman VGA Heatpipe Cooler
In the Box:
And here's a few images of this monster mounted in the PC.
Yeah, this thing is definitely a monster!
Active Cooling Solution:
In the box we installed this in we have two 80mm blow holes in the case side blowing cool outside air across the top and bottom of the video card, but what if you're not so lucky? Zalman has addressed that as well by selling an optional add on fan.
The Zalman ZM-OP1 was designed specifically to work with this ZM80X-HP cooler. You can see above the way the plate link assemblies simply slide into the cooler and screw down, well the ZM-OP1 does the same thing..
So while we didn't need this because our case already offered adequate air movement over the graphics board, if your case doesn't this is an excellent solution. You can pick this up in addition to your heat pipe VGA cooler for $9.95 which considering that it comes with a fan grill and all mounting accessories, that isn't too shabby. While we didn't install it I did spin it up to check the volume of this thing, I was pretty impressed. Not only did it move a decent amount of air, but at just 2800RPM at high speed, it was quiet as well.
Performance:
I can hear ya now, who cares what it looks like, I wanna know how it performs! We were not disappointed with the overclocking performance of our FIC Radeon 9800Pro even with stock cooling, so we were anxious to see if adding something like this would give us anything extra. Did it?
Now these are stable speeds we're listing as well. I've actually ran thru a 3dMark03 loop completely with the core at 455MHz but suffered some visual anomalies, so we backed it down to 451MHz and it ran gorgeously. I've never been a big believer that additional cooling on a VGA card could make a difference, but this product definitely proved me incorrect.
It actually makes a good bit of sense when you think about it. There's no denying that today's graphics cards get VERY hot, especially the Radeon series of cards. When you compare even just the surface area of this heat pipe cooler and the stock cooler, there is simply no comparison.
Temperature Performance:
Temperatures with this (and any other VGA card) are the toughest to accurately record. The only option available is to try to lodge a temp diode between the heat sink and the actual core. That's not something that can be done without affecting the cooling efficiency of the unit. Some people may claim it's doable, but anytime you place ANYTHING between the cooler and the core, you are deteriorating performance. To have recorded the temp of the sink itself would have been a silly attempt at temperature reporting. With a heat sink the hotter it is, the better it's performing. That GPU is cranking out heat, if it's not in the heat sink then it's still trapped in the GPU and that is NOT a good thing!
I can tell you this, the original cooler got to the point that you would not want to safely touch it during 3D applications, it was unbelievably hot. This new heat pipe cooler as long as you keep good air flow moving across is touchable even in intense gaming. Don't get me wrong, it's still VERY hot, but it's bearable. If you remove the air flow from around it, then it too gets insanely hot. What that tells me is that all of that additional heat sink surface area is doing it's job. The fact that the back gets as hot as the front (generally always feels about the same) tells me that the heat pipe is also doing it's job and transferring the heat evenly among it's total surface area.
So I'm not going to place up any temperature numbers here because plainly put, they would be misleading at best, bogus at worst.
Conclusion:
This is again something that I can't sum up in a pretty package for you and say "buy" or "don't buy". That decision remains in your hands. With todays graphics cards, especially high end cards like we used here, it's hard to believe that overclocking them is necessary at all. For general gaming I would have to almost say that it is not. However, as soon as you start getting involved in those spitting contests with your friends and comparing benchmark scores, you'll see that every bit helps.
The largest advantage to this unit is that it is truly well designed and actually does the job it set out to do, it provides more efficient and better cooling than the stock cooler that comes on your card. Any of you that have touched that little heat sink know already that it needs all the help it can get!
To me (I admit I'm a bit cheesy at times!) the look of this thing is hella cool. There is simply no meaner looking product out there to mount on your VGA card. So if cool points mean anything to you, chalk up a few for this thing!
This product is not without it's faults though. I could mention the fact that it's installation is an in-depth project, but few things that yield results are a simply "snap in place and forget it". So yes, this is a bit more of a pain to install than anything else we've seen out there, it's performance exceeds anything else we've seen out there, so it makes sense.
I've only really found one "real" problem with this product, and unfortunately for this product it's a relatively big one. This heat pipe cooler does not offer any cooling for the memory on your video card. Not only that, but once it's mounted there really isn't any room for you to add anything to assist in the memory cooling of your video card. I can understand them not wanting to tie in a heat sink for the memory chips into the same design as who wants all the heat that this heat pipe cooler puts out transferred to their memory chips? That said, the fact that this product hinders you from adding any has to be noted.
In the end I would have to say that I can still recommend this unit. I'll be honest, it's not coming off of my 9800Pro now that the review is done. The increased cooling efficiency, and definitely the increased core performance gives me the motivation to want to keep this product. Is it right for you? You'll have to decide that for yourself.
PROS:
- Quality built unit
- Increased core overclockability noticeably
- Excellent heat transfer from your GPU
- Intimidating appearance. :)
CONS:
- No Memory Cooling Assistance
- A bit of a pain to install
Thanks for checking out the review and a big thanks to Sharka for sending it out to us to look at. If you have comments, questions, or concerns please feel free to head by our forums and be heard. Otherwise, I'd recommend heading back to the OCAddiction front page and checking out the rest of the GooSH!™ available...
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