Testing:
In order to put the
Zalman VF3000F (GTX470/465) VGA cooler through its paces, it was tested against the stock Gigabyte cooler, and installed on a GTX470 in a system with the following other hardware:
» Intel Core i5 750 (2.66GHz) Quad-core processor
» Gigabyte GA-P55M-UD2 Socket LGA1156 motherboard
» Gigabyte GTX470 1280MB PCIe video card
» Western Digital 1TB WD1001FALS SATA 3Gbps hard drive
»
Crucial Ballistix Thermal Sensor PC12600 1600MHz DDR3 dual channel memory
» Silverstone SST-ST60EF 600 watt power supply
» Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit operating system
Our test system is run on an open bench in a room with an ambient temperature of 28 degrees Celsius.
CPUID's Hardware Monitor 1.16 was used for measuring the idle and load temperatures. Idle conditions were established with a 30 minute period where only Hardware Monitor was running. For load conditions, a combination of
FutureMark's 3DMark Vantage and
Unigine Corporation's Heaven Benchmark 2.0 were run for 30 minutes. All readings were noted and the maximum readings for each run were charted. No additional fans are used in this setup.
The graph below shows the idle condition results for three setups - with the stock cooler and with the VF3000F attached to the FanMate2 on low and high speeds. With the FanMate2 on low we already see a benefit, but turned up all the way we get an 8 degree drop.
The next graph shows the load condition results for all three setups. Hardware Monitor gives us both minimum and maximum GPU temperatures, so it's fairly easy to figure out how hot the die got during the tests. As you can see at stock, the Fermi core is quite the little furnace, but just by bringing the VF3000F into the picture we get a fabulous 25 degree temperature drop. As an added bonus, we lost the high pitched whine from the stock cooler.
