Another little mod to the gaming system this week. I picked up a nice Zalman video cooler on sale for about 25 bucks. I haven’t installed a GPU cooler before so I thought it’d be interesting to see what kind of impact it’d make. Here’s a look at my aging, but able, BFG 7900GT with the stock fan/heat sink.
Installation was simple. Just took the stock cooler off, cleaned off the old thermal compound, attached the new heat sinks to the ram chips and then mounted the new cooler. With everything back up and running I was first surprised at how much quieter the new one is. I have it running on 5V “quiet mode” (which is still ~2500 rpm) and it’s barely audible over the other fans in the case. Temperature-wise it’s equally impressive. Between idle and load the GPU temp ranged between the low 40’s to the mid 50’s, which is consistently 10 degrees cooler than with the stock cooler. Even though I’ve got the GPU overclocked by about 24%, I never saw it break 58C while gaming. Ready for this summer’s four day frag-fest!
Tags: Comp hardware / mods
