Geeky Phil

Unlike mechanics, the cooler the electronics the better it is. Spring has just started and I’m already worried of the next season. I went all the way to PC Case Gear because they are one of the cheapest seller around.

Zalman VF1000, OCZ Vendetta 2 & Scythe Kaze 1900rpm

I’m quite concern of the heat generated in my case because of all the acoustic dampening foam which comes with the NZXT Hush. Let me show you the stock ATi Radeon HD4850 from Sapphire.

Sapphire ATi Radeon HD4850

You can see how puny the stock cooler is.. This powerful Graphic Processing Unit’s performance is overwhelming for its price. I guess this is how they cut down the cost for it.

Sapphire ATi Radeon HD4850

You can see how puny it is, the rotor of the cooler is no bigger than a 5c coin. Fixing the Zalman VF1000 onto it requires removing the stock cooler. It’s child’s play removing the screws at the back of the card.

Naked ATi Radeon HD4850

The memory controllers are surrounding the GPU’s chip. Zalman’s memory heat sinks come with double-sided thermal sheets so they are easy to install.

ATi Radeon HD4850 with Zalman VF1000

The copper heat sink is mounted onto the card after sticking all eight memory heat sinks. The Zalman’s VF1000 package comes with a Fanmate 2 controller too. I put it to rest for the memory heat sink’s adhesive to bond. I opened up the fancy box by OCZ and found myself a tower of fins.

OCZ Vendetta 2

You can see how huge it is and how many 5c it can fits, thus totalling the price =P. The tower is connected by 6 heat pipes and it comes with standard LGA775 push pins. Thus you do not need to remove your motherboard to install this gigantic tower.

Cooling in action

It is put up to test after all the installation, including the Scythe Kaze at the rear of the chasis. The Zalman VF1000 LED fan is suprisingly quiet at around 1300rpm. It can spins at full throttle at 2500rpm with just abit of wind sound, simply astonishing. The silent killer reduces the heat of the GPU by 30°C at both idle and full load. The OCZ Vendetta 2 performs as well as the VF1000, just abit louder. Considering the size of the fan, it is acceptable for noise it generates. The Vendetta able to reduce the heat of the Q6600 by approximately 15°C at idle.

Other than the silent killers, the Sythe Kaze works extremely well too, at an extreme level of noise either! I’ve decided to control the load of the fan by using SpeedFan. This utility by Almico allows you to customized the fans in your rig, controlling them when to kick in and when to shut up. This tutorial helped me alot. The Sythe Kaze spins queitly after throttling the speed. It only roars when needed. =)

Before...

and after.