Overclockers Australia - Chipset Cooler Roundup

Chipset Cooler Roundup
Article by James 'Agg' Rolfe

I'm going to spare you a long waffly introduction detailing the extended history of video card cooling. We all know modern 3D cards pump out the heat, and while decent (or at least impressive looking) standard cooling is not unheard of, generally the default cooling for cards is pretty woeful, especially for cards being used in Australian summer conditions. This has become true of motherboard chipsets also, particularly the North Bridge chip. Most if not all motherboards ship with a small heatsink on this chip and on certain motherboards stability can be improved with a better cooler. This market has lead to an (I believe) informal standard of mounting holes around chipsets which has been incorporated both into video cards and motherboards.

In this article I will review and compare a number of coolers that are either designed to fit into these standard holes, or are attached to the chipset in question via an adhesive thermal pad or tape. Depending on which particular device you're mounting the cooler on, you might need either mounting method - so obviously units that provide both score well.

Retail Cooler
First up, the default cooler on the video card used for this test: the MSI 8809 3D AGPhantom. This is a GeForce SDR card - the cores of these older GeForces are infamous for pumping out the heat and under normal usage the back of this card becomes too hot to touch.

click to enlarge

I was amazed when I pulled this "cooler" apart to discover that it's basically a flat plate with a fan stuck on the top. There aren't really any fins or a true heatsink, just a couple of ventilation holes in the bottom plate - air blows through those holes and out along the card without cooling the GPU much at all. Glad to be rid of that one! There was white thermal paste between core and heatsink, but as it was all gunked up with dust etc I cleaned all that off and used some Arctic Silver Thermal Paste instead during the testing.

Tennmax Lasagna BGA Cooler
This unit was probably the first commercial example of this type of cooler - the included instructions are dated July 99 which gives you an indication of how long it's been on the market..

click to enlarge

Buried inside this unit is the smallest fan in the roundup surrounded by an extremely tightly-packed layered heatsink which no doubt is the reason for the "Lasagna" name. It's quite an impressive-looking peice of engineering. The fan is powered by a pass-through molex (HDD) connector. On the base of the unit was a strange black paste/pad combo, which was fairly tough and would survive normal use but crumbled like a thick paste when scraped off. This unit uses a plastic pin system to fit onto the mounting holes and impressed me with how easy to install and remove it is - unfortunately the separate pins are tiny and easy to lose and in fact I've lost one already. However a small nail or any thin enough object will easily replace it. There's no tape included, so if the thing you're cooling doesn't have mounting holes you will have to buy some separate tape or thermal epoxy.

NEXT PAGE - Blue Orb and a couple of newcomers..

Check out over 100 reviews and articles in the Archive!

Major Sponsors: