Installation and Testing:
Prior to installation in the system to be used for testing, I wanted to see if the Zalman VF-900Cu was SLI compatible. The image below shows the X800 GTO with VF-900Cu dropped into the top slot of an SLI motherboard just to see if the cooler fit between the two PCI Express slots. It did with room to spare, opening the door to all the SLI users out there looking for an upgrade for their two VGA coolers. (But first, we have to see if it performs well enough to be considered for that upgrade).
Testing of the
Zalman VF900-Cu was conducted on a test system with the specifications listed below:
» AMD Athlon-64 3200+ Venice core processor
» Thermalright SI-120 CPU cooler
» ASUS A8N-E nForce4 Ultra motherboard
» 2x 1GB Corsair PC3500 DDR
» 1x 200GB Seagate 7200.8 SATA hard drive
» Thermaltake Swing case
» 128MB PowerColor Radeon X800 GTO PCIe graphics card
The PowerColor Radeon X800 GTO card has proven to be a decent (budget) gaming card with strong overclocking potential. The stock cooler seems to do a good job, but my one complaint is that it is a bit louder than other components in the case. It would be nice to see temperatures drop after the VF-900Cu is installed, but a drop in noise output would be even nicer.
The testing is simple, and involves recording idle and load temperatures from the video card while at idle and under a heavy load. The idle condition has the card at default speeds while simply sitting at the Window's desktop with no other applications running. The load conditions have the X800 GTO overclocked and running through multiple cycles of the 3DMark05 benchmark. The stock speed of the card is 400 MHz (GPU) / 350 MHz (MEM) and the maximum stable overclock I could reach with the stock cooling was 470 MHz / 400 MHz. These speeds were used for idle and load testing of both VGA coolers.
Temperature monitoring was done using a Cooler Master Aerogate 3, and the thermal probes were affixed to the base of the coolers as close to the GPU core as possible. With an ambient temperature of 16C maintained throughout testing, the following results were recorded...
As you can see, the temperature drop was impressive. I tested the VF-900Cu at maximum and minimum speed (1350 and 2410 RPM respectively) and in either condition the results beat those provided by the stock cooler. But, the most impressive thing is that under a heavy load, the Zalman cooler was able to shave 9.5C off of the operating temperature. OK, maybe that wasn't the most impressive thing, but it ran a close second to the fact that regardless of speed, the VF-900Cu was quieter than the stock cooler. While at full speed you could still hear the fan (with the case side off), but at the slowest speed it was just about silent. I had to kneel down right next to it to hear it, and in general that is not where I am situated while using the computer!
