Zalman VF700: active cooling for your graphics card
Korean Zalman, known by its original cooling systems, introduced another novelty designed as Flower Heatsink (FHS) and intended for graphics cards.
Photos of VF700 have been surfing the web for a long time already, but nothing has been known about the specs. Fortunately, this weekend our colleagues from China at overclocker.com.cn obtained the first information about cooler features:
As usually, the series includes two models, one all-copper and copper-aluminium differing by heat radiation performance, weight and price. VF700-Cu weighs 270 g, while VF700-ALCu weighs 180 g. Both have identically constructed heatsinks 30 mm high.
As you know, there´s about 20 mm space between neighbouring slots, so the one located next to graphics card slot becomes obstructed. If you wish to install one cooler onto every card in a SLI couple, you should have a motherboard with 60 mm space between PCI-E x16 slots (about 2 slots in-between). Considering the height of primary GPU and the height of elements on the secondary card, a cooler with such design will be too close to conductors of the secondary card raising the risk of short circuit. Besides, considering the cooler pumps air to cool heatsink fins, the standard 40 mm won´t allow satisfactory heat dissipation from the hot primary GPU.
Therefore the company frankly warns about incompatibility with Matrox graphics cards and NVIDIA´s PCX series.
The fan itself has diameter of 70 mm, features 2 ball bearings and lots of thin fins. Being shifted slightly aside the primarily heated surface, it eliminates a "blind spot" above GPU crystal. In the Silent Mode (~1350 rpm) the fan provides 18.5 dB noise, making a good compromise between efficiency and noise.
The bundle includes mini-heatsinks for memory chips and ZM-MC1 rpm controller.
The price is promised within $33-41 range that is rather traditional for the Korean company.
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