Well Im not one to blog generally, but I thought I would make a quick blog about the Zalman cooler I got and fitted to my Asus GTX 480 graphics card today. For those who aren't familiar with the Fermi series of cards by Nvidia, and especially the GTX 480 series, they are power house cards but run notoriously hot. In some instances even reaching 90c + when playing some games. Running metro 2033 I was easily topping 80c with no overclock, and wouldn't even think about overclocking with the stock cooling it came with.
I already had a Zalman cooler fitted to my cpu, which works beautifully, so I decided to go with Zalman for my GTX. An image of my CPU cooler fitted in my pc is bellow.
Anyway dismantling the GTX was fairly straight forward thankfully, but there was thermal paste all over the place when I opened it up. I was expecting a neater job from Asus seeing as they are a very good company for this sort of thing. Pictures of a stock GTX 480 and my GTX with no heatsink can be seen below. Notice the thermal paste they used which was all over the place, and on the top left the GTX's fan, which although fairly small is loud as hell, and doesn't do a very good job of cooling the thing.
Fitting the Zalman was fairly easy, and I wasn't as nervous as I thought I would be doing it considering the price of the card (roughly $400). The only tricky part was putting thermal paste on all its little chips, while making sure there was no overflow when I popped the Zalmans heatsink on. Anyway here is the finished product!
Running Furmark on stock, and with the stock fan on 100% speed I was getting temperatures of 90c+. With the Zalman on the lowest fan speed I am getting 75c, while on full blast Im reaching less than 65c. And on full blast the Zalman fans are extremely quiet, unlike the stock fan which sounded like a vacuum cleaner.
All in all Im very happy, and now, to overclock!
I already had a Zalman cooler fitted to my cpu, which works beautifully, so I decided to go with Zalman for my GTX. An image of my CPU cooler fitted in my pc is bellow.
Anyway dismantling the GTX was fairly straight forward thankfully, but there was thermal paste all over the place when I opened it up. I was expecting a neater job from Asus seeing as they are a very good company for this sort of thing. Pictures of a stock GTX 480 and my GTX with no heatsink can be seen below. Notice the thermal paste they used which was all over the place, and on the top left the GTX's fan, which although fairly small is loud as hell, and doesn't do a very good job of cooling the thing.
Fitting the Zalman was fairly easy, and I wasn't as nervous as I thought I would be doing it considering the price of the card (roughly $400). The only tricky part was putting thermal paste on all its little chips, while making sure there was no overflow when I popped the Zalmans heatsink on. Anyway here is the finished product!
Running Furmark on stock, and with the stock fan on 100% speed I was getting temperatures of 90c+. With the Zalman on the lowest fan speed I am getting 75c, while on full blast Im reaching less than 65c. And on full blast the Zalman fans are extremely quiet, unlike the stock fan which sounded like a vacuum cleaner.
All in all Im very happy, and now, to overclock!
