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It is increasingly being realised lately, that cooling your CPU well is not all that is required for stability. Other components, notably video cards and motherboard chipsets, have been recieving some attention in the form of specialised cooling kits. In-case airflow is also being recognised as important and a few devices have appeared on the market recently to allow you to easily increase, direct or otherwise tweak the flow of air through your case. Two such devices are GlobalWin's CAF-12 and CBF-32 slot coolers.

CAF-12	CBF-32

There's no rocket science involved here - this is another example of a simple idea being brought to fruition. Both units consist of a mounting frame for one or more fans which is designed to be attached to the top of the slot backplates - the same screws that hold the slot card (such as a video card, network card etc) in place secure the fans. From this position the fans are designed to blow down onto the cards themselves. This layout gives these devices 2 major advantages over some other case-airflow-tweaking devices I've reviewed recently in that [a] they don't take up any slots and [b] they are much more flexible in how they can be used to cool specific devices. You could, for example, mount them high on the slots to concentrate on the AGP video card or, if you have a motherboard jam-packed with cards, you could put the unit lower down to keep the air circulating over them.

Of course, this concept is not exactly revolutionary - this was pioneered by The CardCooler a year or so ago.

Globalwin have never been known to skimp on the quality of their fans and these units continue the trend. The CAF-12 uses a hefty 120mm dual ball-bearing fan from Innovative with a passthrough molex power connector. The CBF-32 uses 2 of the familiar Y.S.Tech 60mm units they have used with much success on many of their CPU coolers. These have the 3-pin intelligent connector so you can monitor their RPM's but in case you don't have enough fan headers GW have supplied a y-connector so you can power both fans off one header. Both kits also come with 2 mounting screws.

You can see how I mounted each unit, with the focus being on cooling the video card, in the following photos:

Globalwin CAF-12

Globalwin CBF-32

I tested the units in my Macase K10 mid-tower case with case-front fan. This system C400@600MHz @2.3v and a Diamond Viper V770U at default clock, an SB16 ISA and a Skywell PCI Fast Ethernet card. On hot days this case does tend to heat up a fair bit during gaming. I decided to concentrate these coolers on the video card as this has been known to top 50C, measured with a remote temperature probe stuck to the back of the card behind the graphics chip, and that kind of temperature can't be good for it in the long term.

I left the Macase's case fan on so the units aren't just blowing hot air around. In fact, the fan intakes are quite close to the case wall and I think they'd be causing a strong low-pressure area there - on the Macase the rear of the case is ventilated with several rows of holes and I could feel a slight intake of air there. In this configuration it seems to be working to their advantage but if your case is well sealed and/or unusually narrow these units may be starving themselves against the case wall.

I played Driver for 30 mins in each configuration with a SETI@HOME session running in the background. This is a good way to stress the video card and ensure that every cpu cycle is used productively. The ambient temperature was about 26.5C. The results follow:

Pretty much as you'd expect, the larger CAF-12 brought the system temp down the most while the more focussed twin-fan CBF-32 had the greatest effect on the video card. However, it's pretty clear that both units are doing an excellent job. You even get a little extra CPU cooling as well. As with the 2CoolPC Plus, don't expect them to magically solve your heat problems - if your system has terrible airflow in and out of the case then for the most part units like this will just be blowing hot air around. However, as demonstrated here, they can have quite an effect if used with a bit of forethought. There's a lot of room for experimentation, too - raising and lowering the units depending on your system layout, maybe even reversing the fans. For the price they're a bargain and recommended.