my "mini" review of the Zalman VF-700cu VGA cooler... (pics)

O

ozziegn

The man behind the curtain...
Joined
Jan 13, 2001
Messages
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after seeing mid to high 80's from my stock X800 XT AIW's cooler, I decided that I needed to find a cooler that could do a better job at keeping my toasty AIW a tad bit cooler. I initially thought of buying one of the Artic Silencer thingys but I've read several posts about how that cooler's fan draws too much power from a video card's fan header thus they've been known to cause some sort of sparking action with some people. (however, I'm sure that these cases are probably very rare but nonetheless...)

okay, so then someone on this forum had mentioned that I should look into the Zalman VF700-cu cooler. boy am I glad I did...

here's a couple shots of what the cooler looks like mounted on my X800 XT AIW card:

x800xt1.jpg


lian_li4.jpg


-as you can see, the cooler looks pretty darn nifty and it does an awesome job at keeping my video card thats currently O/Ced to a measly 550/560 with temps not going over 59C even when running the RTHDR test for over an hour. as I said earlier, my video card's stock cooler's temps would easily peg into the 80C area pretty darn quickly.

the VF700's fan is almost dead silent even when running it at 12V. too bad I couldnt say the same about my video card's stock fan that sounded like a mini Delta fan screaming when the card was being stressed out. the included 8 BGA memory heatsinks is also a nicely added bonus but I cant imagine how effective they really are considering how tiny they are IMO. oh well, I guess something's better than nothing when it comes to cooling RAM on video cards.

so all in all, I am VERY happy with my latest purchase. the Zalman VF700-cu does everything that its supposed to and it does it at damn-near dead silence as well. I would highly recommend it for those of you that are looking for high performance video card cooling but dont want to go with the water cooling route.
 
Nice review.

Also from the looks of your first pic it looks like you are a fan of Tom Hanks. :D
 
My stock x800XT AIW does 560/590 without going over 80 celcius after a hard gaming experience....Not that it really matters since the cores are rated to over 95 celcius...i was thinking about getting one of those zalman coolers though...thanks for the post.
 
^ mine does something like 550/560 on the stock cooler but like I said earlier, it ran too hot for my likes so thats why I bought the Zalman.
 
My stock cooler died today, so I went out and bought an ATI Silencer 4... Also sexy, also good :)
 
Great mini-review! :) Thanks for the info, I will consider Zalman in the future for my cooling needs. Sure sexy looking things! :)

BTW: A couple comments...

(sorry, slightly off topic, but I am going to risk it)

--> wow... that is one hell of a camera... nice pictures! Model/band?

---> nice job with routing the cables... my box looks okay, but yours is... clean. Very sweet. :)

Thanks for the post!

-Skystalker
 
Skystalker said:
--> wow... that is one hell of a camera... nice pictures! Model/band?
Click to expand...

thats for the picture comments.

its only a 4MP Canon A80 camera. the reason why my pictures (for the most part) always look good is because I always take the time to use a tripod so I dont have to use the camera's flash which 99% of the time stinks on all digital cameras because they almost always tend to wash the pictures out too much.

using a tripod allows me to manually choose what shutter speeds I need so I dont have to depend on using the flash.
 
Nice... Too bad I already took the water cooling route, its highly doubted that that video card cooler would do dick all for my mini oven, aka the 9800 XT.
 
Ya man, those pics are smoking hot :) Macro shot?

looks like I need a tri-pod :)
 
I put a VF700 AlCu on my X800XL non-AIW and it never passes 60c full load after 2 hours of gaming in my SFF, which isnt the coolest of cases ;)
 
I've got the same heatsink on my x800xt and it works wonders for me too.

My temps were 44-46C @ idle and up to 78C @ load with the stock cooler.

With this zalman I'm idling @ 31-33C and load has never went beyond 51-54C so needless to say it's an awesome cooler.

The difference for me with the ramsinks is about a 20mhz difference, I couldn't go beyond 560 or so with the stock cooler and now I've gotten it above 580 with this setup.

Rock on Zalman!
 
Zalman is a great cooler, mine does anywhere between 54-59c under load and overclocked depending on my ambient temperature which hovers around 38c. Got mine for 29.99 plus 4.50 shipping from Jab-Tech.
 
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