8800 GTS Cooling Complete!

I've always been astounded at how hot my NVIDIA 8800 GTS gets. Back when my case had stock cooling and was nestled in the snug, warm reaches under my desk, it would get near 90 Celsius while I was playing heavy-duty games. Well, a few recent changes to my cooling have made a HUGE difference.



I recently bought a 25 cm XCLIO Amazing Fan and installed it on my side-panel to help get some really good air-flow in my case. That was the first thing to make a big difference on my temperatures, as my 8800 GTS was idling in the high 50s to low 60s Celsius range, as opposed to its usual mid to high 60s range. That, to me, was huge, so I thought there would be little room for more improvement, but I had to try.

That's when I grabbed a Zalman VF1000 VGA cooler. The thing had some good ratings, and I decided I wanted to really lower my 8800 GTS' temperatures, as my card was still climbing around the high 70s to mid 80s Celsius, even with my recent fan addition.

I took an afternoon to install the VF1000 and that went relatively smooth (for a while I thought I had fried my card, but it just wasn't seated properly >_<). The fan in the middle of the copper heatsink blades seemed awesome to me, but the thing I was most worried about was that my card no longer had an exhaust fan pulling the heat out of my case, as the stock cooler on the 8800 GTS does have one. So, I grabbed a EVERCOOL SB-F1 PCI slot fan I had and installed it right next to the copper blades of the VF1000:



The fit was perfectly snug, and at first I was afraid that the exhaust fan would keep the VF1000's fan from doing its job, but airflow and workloads remained normal. The result has been amazing. My card idles at about 50 - 51 Celsius, which was great and all, but when I ran a few games the card never went over 60 Celsius! Quite the pleasant surprise.

The best thing about it is that all the fans I have installed and/or used to replace other fans are VERY QUIET, so they all come highly recommended.

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