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Zalman VGA Cooler Review

One of the most annoying things that can happen is when your video card fan dies. Finding a replacement fan is tough, replacing the darn thing voids your warranty, and if you want to RMA it with your video card manufacturer it usually involves RMA'ing the entire card even if it works properly. Failing that, you end up with a ghetto cooling system where you stack a couple of case fans on top of each other on end to blow air onto the active-turned-passive heatsink.

The after-market video card cooling market is still in its infancy. While there are many cooling solutions for CPU, addressing both noise and/or performance issues, there isn't much available for video cards. Like CPU cooling, different manufacturers have different mounting methods and placement of possible obstructions (such as really tall capacitors) has previously made a multi-card cooler a daunting task. For example, Arctic Cooling has multiple revisions of its video card coolers to suit a few cards each. Heck, there are four revisions for ATi and five revisions for nVidia cards. Daunting task indeed.

Zalman is a name familiar to enthusiasts. Makers of silent/quiet components, Zalman has made a name for itself as the forerunner for Silent PC solutions. Recently, Zalman has added another two products to their VGA cooler lineup. In addition to the fanless heatpipe solutions already released, Zalman has released a pair of active coolers - one purely copper and another combination of aluminium and copper. What we have today is the Al-Cu hybrid version, the VF700-AlCu. This baby looks a lot like the CPU heatsinks we've seen lately from Zalman with the extra large fan (for a graphics card) and the circular fins that protrude outward.