Video Card Cooling Comparison

Date Reviewed: June 17, 2000
Reviewed By: Jason Rabel

The Lineup...

After contacting several different online vendors about my little video card cooling experiment, several agreed to send my some samples of their products to try out and see how well they worked. With that being said, I would like to thank Millisec, Globalwin USA, Cold CPU, and The Card Cooler for their generosity.

Being an owner of a 3D Prophet DDR-DVI, everyone knows how hot the Geforce chip gets and how wimpy the stock cooler is on all the different vendor's video cards. In my quest to keep my system as cool as possible that stock HSF just had to go.

There are two basic methods for cooling down the video card. The first is replacing the HSF with a beefier aftermarket model. The second option is to keep the stock HSF on and use a "Card Cooler" that mounts above the video card and blows cool air down onto the whole thing.

The products that I have assembled for this comparison include the following:

Globalwin - CAF12
Globalwin - CAF32
Globalwin - FA420
Millisec - Vice I Video Cooler
Millisec - Vice II Video Cooler
The Card Cooler - The Ball Bearing Card Cooler
Some of my own creations

So let's start out with the coolers!

The CAF12 is one of Globalwin's latest entrants into the video cooling arena. It's basically a 120mm fan mounted on a special "L" shaped bracket that allows you to mount it above your Video / PCI cards. One nice thing about it is the bracket allows you to "slide" the fan up and down about an inch. Another nice feature is the inclusion of finger guards so you don't accidentally hack off a finger or get any wires caught in the fan.

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