The Verdict
So, what does all this mean? Well, to me at least, that it actually does make a difference. It's not a big one though as it is only a couple of degrees. The system this solution was tested on though, didn’t have a heat problem to start with, and it already has good airflow to cool things down (yes… even with the spaghetti cabling). It has a 120mm on the front blowing air in, 1 80mm fan on the side blowing in, 2 on the back blowing out and one 80 on the top blowing out as well.
I think the users who will be able to get the most out of this product are those that have a silent PC with passive cooling on their motherboard and CPU coolers that have their fins exposed. (Like the cooler on this system.) If you notice, the card wasn’t affected as much as the CPU/motherboard and it makes sense since the heatsink is not exposed. Also, something else that I noticed was that the CPU cooler’s fan was rotating a bit faster with the Card Cooler XT mounted. The air from the cooler was pushing the CPU heatsink fan I presume. (Normally, the CPU fan is rotating at 1800~183x RPM. With the fans it was rotating at 189x~191x).
With that in mind, a graphics card cooler that might benefit from this device is Zalman’s VF-700 or similar coolers, or passively cooled heatpipe sinks.
***IMPORTANT*** The above mentioned heatsinks are only to be taken as examples and not as an indication that they will actually work or have enough clearance as to allow the use of both the heatsink and the Card Cooler XT simultaneously. I haven’t actually tried them. Noise wise, I wasn’t able to hear the extra fans above the ones I already have. Not a clear indication, I know, but I don’t have anything to measure the noise levels.
I do know however, that I will be keeping the Card Cooler XT in my case. No dust bunnies were hurt during the making of this article.
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