Right, conclusion time. I'm afraid that the product as tested today is "okay" and nothing more than that. After the installation I was really positive as I saw the core temperature of the GPU idling at 32 Degrees C. So figured that without overclocking that temperature would remain at the very least below 35-40 Degrees C. That obviously did not happen as a simple 3DMark05 run shows that the GPU core was at 50 Degrees C after merely seconds.

Overclocking itself did not increase that roof temperature by a large margin yet 53 Degrees C is still a high temperature for a really excessive enthusiast overclock. As a result we have not been able to push the core of the GPU higher than 700 MHz which is a standard overclock for a card like this.

So in my believe at default settings .. the Peltier cooler is just not setup well, it's setup to conservative making the implementation hardly worth the effort. I mean .. TEC cooling is a proven technology it can do so much better than what we have seen today. Why isn't there a small button/switch/dimmer on the device that allows a user to control the amount of wattage themselves ? For this product to work well it needs to go beyond the excessive safety margin it's being setup in. This is peltier cooling .. this is meant for enthusiast consumers, geeks, and hardware freaks on a leash. Guys like you and me who want to squeeze some extra FPS out of our cards to crush a 3Dmark06 record :)

So in retrospect that original almost near silent running 7900 GTX VGA reference cooler from NVIDIA gives me the exact same results with only slightly higher temperatures yet with way less noise and the same overclock results.

I touched it already but there's one thing that I absolutely disliked about this TEC cooler ... the noise it produces. In this test the fans where spinning 100% all the time. The specs say that there are three RPM states (rotational speed of the fans), but that just isn't the case. You have two fans rotating at high speed dispersing heat through out your system with an overall PC noise level climbing above 52 DBa and that's just not okay. Also why two fans ?

So if MACS would like to see this product becoming a success I'd like to give them the following three pointers. In essence the idea behind the product is really good, yet:

• Make a design that pushes heat outside the casing. A good amount of heat is dumped inside the system. It's not extreme though as very little wattage on the peltier element is actually being used with it's conservative cooling.
• Allow the user to control how much wattage can used to cool down the GPU with somethign as simple as a switch (default/cool/super-cool). I like to see my GPU at 20-30 Degrees at full load.
• Make a design that is running way more silent then this as this is just far from okay.

So there you have it. I think the idea behind peltier cooling is really lovely. The additional wattage most of us really can life with, in the case of the MAC cooler we just tested it's not even 20 Watts, so that's just not an issue. However for this product to succeed a lot must be changed as right now .. there simply is not one good reason to replace a default cooler with this TEC cooler unless that cooler is either defect or really bad.

Granted, this TEC cooler is cooling slightly better than traditional fan cooling but it is loud and it is not removing drastic amounts of heat from your GPU making it "just" a cooler.

So my question to MACS would be this, with a lot more noise, heat being dumped inside the PC, no large performance difference over a reference cooler (temperature wise) why should we invest 60 Euros in this product ?

I hope to see some revisions to this product in the near future after which I'll gladly give it another chance.