The Basics:

Back to the cooler itself. The first thing you may notice is the very large copper slug nestled under all of the fins and the giant green shroud. Attached to the slug are 5 long heatpipes which will hopefully provide us with a great deal of cooling.



Flipping the VF3000F over gives you a better view of the layout of the heatpipes and how big the heatsink is. Next, we placed your typical run-of-the-mill US nickel on the base to show you just how nice the finish is. Not only can you make out most of the lettering on the coin, but you can almost make out the details of the picture on the wall above the cooler.



Next, we took off the four screws that hold the shroud on to the actual heatsink assembly to show you the fan and fin layout. The black matrix in the middle is the fan wiring. Both fans are rated for a maximum of 3,000RPM at 33dB, so they should be very quiet during even the most strenuous operation.



The next two images below show our victim - a Gigabyte GTX470 - prior to testing the VF3000F cooler. This is strictly a reference cooler, so we shouldn't be surprised if we hit close to 100 degrees Celsius under a heavy load.



Getting our Zalman VF3000F installed took about 30 minutes from the time we started dismantling our stock cooler until we finished installing the VF3000F and were ready to begin torture testing. Most of the time was devoted to removing the stock screws (who uses thread-lock on a video card?) and covering the memory chips and voltage regulator modules with the included thermal paste - per Zalman's instructions. Once that was done, it was pretty straight forward thanks to the detailed instructions. As you can see below, the Zalman cooler is a bit larger than the reference cooler, so you may need to adjust your expansion cards accordingly - with this cooler installed, the card actually takes up 3 slots!



One pretty cool added feature is that the fans have LEDs, and as you can see in the image below they match the "green team" color scheme nicely.