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The Card Cooler Review
Written: 6/7/99 The Card Cooler is one of the coolest and most effective devices I've ever came across. The first thing I thought when I open the package was "This is great! Why didn't anyone thought of this sooner?" In a way, The Card Cooler is similar to the 3Dfx Cool Voodoo Cooler but it's a much much better design. Have you ever wonder why 3Dfx Cool don't show you any pictures of their Voodoo Cooler on their home page? Because if you see what it looks like, I doubt you would buy it. It's nothing more than one or two small 50mm fans on a strip of metal that they sell for $16 to $26. Chick here to see the Heatsink Guide's side by side comparison picture of The Card Cooler and the Voodoo Cooler. The Card Cooler is made up of 2 three inch case fans, held together by a couple of aluminum straps. It's a simple, inexpensive and effective way to keep your graphics accelerators and other system cards cool. The Card Cooler works for any brand of video cards and will cool several cards simultaneously. Perfect if you have a 2D/3D video card and a pair of Voodoo 2s.Using The Card Cooler will not void the manufacturers warranty on your cards. This is not the case with other video card cooling solutions, like the TennMax coolers. Installing The Card Cooler is as easy as killing Todd in a game of Quake 2 (Sorry Todd, but it's true. he he he :-)). All you need to do is unscrew your first and third slots on your AGP/PCI devices and screw The Card Cooler on (see above photo). Three minutes and you're done. The fans comes with pass though power connectors so you don't have to worry about running out of power supply connectors. So how does it perform? Pretty damn good! I installed The Card Cooler in my Pentium 3 that's running at 580Mhz. The cooler was aimed right at the Diamond Viper V770 video card. The first thing I notice was The Card Cooler drop my system temp by 2F. This is no small feat considering that I have 10 fans in the case already. Unfortunately, The Card Cooler didn't allow me to run the Viper V770 any higher than what it already did, which was 170Mhz core and 200Mhz memory. I wasn't expecting it to make my Viper run faster anyway because the V770 already has a huge 2" Global Win heatsink fan on it (see photo below).
The next thing I did was to remove the fan off the Global Win heatsink. The fan that came with the Global Win is a big 60x25 unit that moves 26 CFM of air. I wanted to see if the 2 fans from The Card Cooler would be enough to cool the V770 with just a heatsink on it and no fan. I'm happy to report that the Viper ran at 170/200 without any problem. Running the system this way gave me back a PCI slot! This is one of great things about The Card Cooler. You don't lose any PCI Slots. Besides being a great device to cool down hot video cards, The Card Cooler can also be used as a case cooler. I found that out when I installed the unit in another computer with no case fans. This was a Celeron running at 458Mhz with a Creative TNT video card. With the case cover on, it runs at a very hot 102F. With the case cover off, it's still runs quite hot at 96F. Once I installed The Card Cooler the system temp went down to just 89F, with the case cover on! With The Card Cooler now blowing air at the TNT card, I was able to overclock the Creative card to 110/120 without any problems. This is just as high as I can get with a TennMax cooler. However, the TennMax cooler won't lower your case temp 13F or let you keep your video card warranty. Overall, a really great product. Made by an overclocker for overclockers. Price at just $20, you really can't go wrong with this product. If you add up the cost it would take for you to buy 2 three inch case fans and the straps. Then add up the time it would take to put the thing together, you'll wonder how he's making any money selling it for just $20. If you're looking for that perfect video card cooling solution that just happens to do a very good job of lower your case temp too, The Card Cooler is it. The Goods
The Bads
Our rating: 9/10
Thanks to The Card Cooler for supplying us with The Card Cooler |
