Zalman VF3000N VGA cooler review - Introduction

It's no secret that hardware runs hot these days. And that created a gap in the graphics card market as the ODMs always will try and put an affective yet cheap cooler on top of your graphics card. A couple of names out there have perfectly interesting solutions, Artic Cooling for example makes some really good VGA coolers. But then there's always Zalman, they recently released their VF3000 series graphics card coolers for both (VF3000A) ATI's latest 4000/5000 series graphics cards and the VF3000N cooler for the GeForce GTX 260,275,280 and 285.

When we were asked to review a unit I forgot to ask for an ATI version which we would have preferred, to check that out on the latest generation Radeon 5000 cards, but sure ... a GeForce edition cooler arrived. Oh well. So what we'll do today is that we'll take a nifty beefy BFG GeForce GTX 285. To spice things up a little we took the pre-overclocked OCX model, which is their highest clocked version available on the market.

So if you are gutsy enough to strip down the graphics card to the bare PCB and put this cooler on, you can achieve temperatures that are much lower than the roughly 80 degrees C temps we would normally get from this card.

Over the next few pages we'll startup a large photo-session where we'll guide you through the product, its installation and then of course temperature and sound-pressure measurements. Have a peek at the prepped and finished card which just had a majestic makeover as it is mounted with a Zalman VF3000N cooler.

Oh did I already mention that it is a big cooler?