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The CardCooler has been around for a while now. It's a fairly simple device and there have been many imitators since. What is it? A couple of 80mm fans mounted in a frame that lets you suspend it sideways inside your case, blowing down onto the cards in your motherboard. This makes more direct use of the airflow through your case to cool your video card, motherboard chipset etc, without having to directly modify the coolers on those units which may endanger your warranty.

The unit I was sent for testing has fans with ball-bearings, for USD$24.00. There is a sleeve-bearing unit, but as it's only USD$4.00 cheaper I think you'd have to be mad to sacrifice the reliability of a ball-bearing fan for a few shekels. It should be a big enough hint for you that CardCooler offer a lifetime warranty on the ball-bearing unit but only 1 year on the sleeve-bearing one. In fact, I know of one person who had a fan die on the sleeve-bearing version. It's a simple function of their design that they are cheaper, but less reliable. As a further option, you can have fans with 3-pin intelligent fan connectors for RPM monitoring etc, for $25.00. The review unit has the standard 4-pin Molex (hdd-type) power connectors, with two passthrough connectors. You can join them together to make a single passthrough, of course, as shown in the photo above.

The fans themselves are 80x80x25mm Sunon KD1208PTB2-6's, which move 36CFM each at 2900rpm. At 32dB each they're not the quietest fans around but I've heard a few people say the CardCooler is silent when locked up inside your case. If I listen carefully I can hear the unit but it's certainly not intrusive.

On to the testing. My usual hotbox testbed was used, a Celeron 400@600MHz @ 2.3v in a Macase K10 midtower. The Soyo SY-6VBA-133 motherboard was used for it's ability to monitor the thermal diode inside the Celeron, and the video card was an AOpen PA-3030 TNT2U card at default clock. I attached a remote thermal probe to the back of the video card chipset in order to gauge how effectively the video card was being cooled. The test consisted of 30 minutes of Unreal Flyby with SETI@HOME in the background to catch any spare CPU cycles.

I ran the first test without the Macase's case-front fan. Without the cardcooler, I recorded these temperatures: CPU: 37C, Case: 51C, Video: 55.5C. This was on a blistering Sydney summer day, the ambient temperature in the room was 31C. With the cardcooler in action in the manufacturer's recommend position (but no case-front fan) the CPU and case temperatures were unchanged, but the video temperature dropped to 52C. Turning the case-front fan on dropped each temperature by about 3C. I moved the unit 1 screw-hole higher (not all cases have another screw-hole above the AGP slot, but the Macase does), so the unit was more central over the AGP slot, and the video temperature dropped to 47C with the case-front fan on - a total drop of 8.5C. Not bad at all.

I'm not going to graph the results because they are quite varied. One of the strengths of this unit is that you have a lot of flexibility in how you mount it. It's held in place by the same screws that hold your cards in, so you can mount it high in the case to concentrate on the video card, or lower if you have a different card you're more interested in cooling. The manufacturer recommends mounting it from the AGP slot screw and the third PCI slot screw, as most people would be interested in cooling their video card. You could even remove the fans and mount them backwards so the unit sucks hot air away from the cards. Your own results will vary widely from mine, but it's pretty clear that this unit can be used to good effect.

Conclusions
Keep in mind that this unit will do very little if your in-case airflow is completely shot. Simply moving hot air around is not going to cool anything. However, most cases have at least a small amount of air throughput due to the power-supply fan, so unless your case is completely jammed with cables and devices you should notice an immediate benefit. In combination with a case-front fan, this unit is quite an effective directional cooler and pretty cheap, too.