Category Archives: VGA Coolers

Thermalright T-Rad2 GPU Cooler Review

Expreview has published a detailed article on Thermalright’s T-Rad2, a new cooler for GPU. T-Rad2 is compatible with mainstream display cards such as NVIDIA GeForce 9xxx and ATI Radeon HD 38xx/48xx Series. See at the end of the post, the link to the compatibiliy list.

FurMark has been used to overload the GPU.

Read the complete review here: Showing off the power of dual fan: Thermalright T-Rad2 GPU cooler review


Links:
– T-Rad2 @ thermalright.com
– Graphics Cards Compatibilities @ thermalright.com

EVGA GeForce GTX 280 Hydro Copper Review

Water cooling is the most efficient way to cool the GPU that’s why EVGA has released an overclocked and water-cooled GeForce GTX 280. EVGA Hydro Copper 16 is equiped with a large copper block that replaces the reference cooling.


Read the complete review here: Water cooled EVGA GTX 280 HC tested

Conclusion:
GTX 280 is the fastest single GPU card and EVGA most certainly pushed it even further with their overclocking. In order to make sure your card lasts for a long time, EVGA decided that water cooling is the way to go. So, they’ve made their own water block design made of pure copper, but also a bit heavy. The card is not heavy enough to damage your PCIe slot, but you should still make sure it’s screwed to the case nice and tightly.

More news about GeForce GTX 280: GeForce GTX 280 @ Geeks3D.

MSI GeForce 9600 GT Hybrid Freezer Review

This graphics card by MSI, is equiped with MSI’s new cooler using Hybrid Freezer technology. It offers a total silence in idle (normal Windows operation) as well as in loading (during intensive gaming). This card has 1Gb of onboard memory that can help when the gamer wants to play at ultra high resolution (but in that case, the gameplay is limited by the power of the 9600 GT so ultra high res gaming is not an good example of application of 1Gb of memory). Anyway, the cooler is the key of this GeForce and temperature stays around 46 degrees in idle and does not exceed 65 degrees in full load.

MSI GeForce 9600 GT Hybrid Freezer has the following features:
– GPU: G94
– stream processors: 64
– core clock: 650MHz
– shader clock: 1625MHz
– memory clock: 900MHz
– memory: 1Gb DDR3 / 256-bit
– DirectX 10 / OpenGL 2.1 / Shader Model 4.0


Read the complete review here: MSI N9600GT Hybrid Freezer.
More information at MSI: N9600GT Hybrid Freezer

Need more news about GeForce 9600 GT? Jump to: GeForce 9600 GT @ Geeks3D

Sparkle GeForce 9600 GT Passive Cooler Review

Guru3D has just published a review about the Sparkle’s GeForce 9600 GT passively cooled with 512MB GDDR3 memory.

The GeForce 9600 GT has the followinfg features:
– GPU: G94 (or D9M)
– shader processors: 64
– ROPs: 16
– transistors: 505M / 65nm
– core clock: 650MHz (ref: 650MHz)
– memory clock: 900Mhz (ref: 800MHz)
– shader clock: 1625MHz (ref: 1600MHz)
– memory: 512Mb DDR3 / 256-bit
– DirectX 10 / OpenGL 2.1 / shader model 4.0

The Verdict:
With a pretty standard amount of airflow in the PC the core temperature of this passively cooled product just did not exceed 60 degrees C. And that’s pretty extraordinary as I’ve seen active cooled solutions at much higher thermals.
…
With such great temperatures I did what I normally do not do with a passively cooled product, I overclocked it. Standard clocks are 650/1600/800 for the core, shader processors and memory respectively. We boosted performance up big-time, by overclocking the card to 766/1955/1053 MHz. That is 10 to 15% extra performance straight out of the box there. For a passive product that’s just an astounding overclock.

Read the complete review here: Sparkle GeForce 9600 GT Passive Cooler.

Want more news about the GeForce 9600 GT: GeForce 9600 GT @ Geeks3D.

Sapphire Toxic Radeon HD 4850 Review

The biggest problem of Radeon HD 4850 is that this card reaches high temperatures (70 degrees celcius) even in idle (i.e. not loaded). So manufacturers decided to discard the stock cooler in favour of a better and more efficient cooler. In these reviews, the Sapphire’s solution, the Radeon HD 4850 Toxic edition, is analyzed. This Radeon features a Zalman heatpipe fan, providing more efficient cooling, quieter operation and more headroom for performance tuning.


Due to the better cooling solution, frequencies have been overclocked:

Toxic Radeon HD 4850 has the following features:
– GPU: RV770
– stream processors: 800
– ROPs: 16
– transistors: 956M
– memory 512Mb / 256-bit
– core clock: 675MHz
– memory clock: 1100Mhz
– DirectX 10 / OpenGL 2.1


However, the Sapphire cooling solution is one of the noisiest cards under idle: around 40db. But this cooler does its job by keeping GPU temperature at least 20 degrees lower than a standard Radeon HD 4850.

Reviews:

More information about Toxic HD 4850: Toxic HD 4850 @ Sapphire

More news about Radeon HD 4850: Radeon HD 4850 @ Geeks3D

Zalman VF900-Cu Ultra Quiet Heatpipe VGA Cooler

The competition between ATI and NVIDIA is fierce; it’s definitely a buyers market in video cards these days. New chips are coming out every six months and they’re almost always running more transistors, faster. There’s a fair chance that the hottest and noisiest component inside your PC is the video card. Fortunately, the PC cooling industry has responded with some excellent products to keep the GPU heat and noise down. Join Benchmark Reviews as we look at how the Zalman VF900-Cu Ultra Quiet Heat-pipe VGA Cooler saved the day for one system builder.

Read the complete review HERE.