Zalman VF700-Cu Copper Ultra-Quiet VGA Video Card Cooler

List Price: $39.99 Discount Price: $24.95

Features:

• Supports up to GeForce 7800 GTX and Radeon X1800
• Does not generate noise or vibration in Silent Mode
• Pure copper base material ensures excellent heat dissipation
• Fan installed in the heatsink (FHS) cools not only the VGA chipset and VGA RAM, but all other VGA components as well
• Silent Mode and Normal Mode selection provided to accommodate the user's environment and preference

Customer Reviews:

Quiet, effective and an excellent value. Deduct one star for installation problems. [Posted on 2007-05-11]
This heatsink and fan from Zalman is highly recommended for anybody who's computer is made noticeably louder by their video graphics card fan. The Zalman fan is capable of running from 5 volts for quiet operation and from 12 volts for high cooling. Outside of my PC I hooked the fan up to an external power supply and in the 12 volt mode it made some noise but is much less loud than a typical video card cooler. In 5 volt mode it was so quiet that I wasn't able to distinguish it until I had my ear about 6 inches away from it. In other words it has the ability to run at almost complete silence.

I made the decision to install it in my PC using the 5 volt quiet mode and I wasn't interested in installing the included optional mode switch in my case. My PC is now in my living room and was generating a bit of a racket. At the same time I installed the VF-700 I also installed a CNPS9500 LED for my rather noisy standard intel cooler for my Pentium 4 HT. While the reduction of noise from the CPU replacement made the most difference I know that the fan for my video card was perhaps the third most noisy item in my PC. After replacing these two fans with Zalman products my PC is less than half as loud. The Power supply is now the loudest fan in the case and runner up is a fan on a Matrox RTX100 editing board. There are 4 hard drives in this PC so it surprised me somewhat how much difference a whisper quiet CPU and video card fan combination made.

I don't regret committing to quiet mode with the VF700. It actually provides superior cooling to the factory original heatsink and fan of my XFX GeForce6600 GT. In fact I have had issues with that card rendering some strange clipping errors after playing games for prolonged periods (or on games that push the card such as Oblivion perhaps after just a few minutes). I had guessed that the issue was from overheating. After installing the VF700 such problems appear to be relegated to the past. Checking the GPU core temperature during heavy load confirms that the chip is now running several degrees cooler than before. I hadn't logged exact figures in the past so I can't provide any hard numbers. I can only assume that the 12 volt high cooling mode would work well if you are interested in overclocking your video card.

Everything about this product is perfect except for the potential for installation problems. The heatsink is rather large and bulky. I didn't have many problems installing the heatsink on my video card, only the provided memory chip heatsinks could not be installed because they stood in the way of the main heatsink. The heatsink also did not get in the way of any installed cards on my PC and my case is a full tower case so there was plenty of room for the VF700.

The reason I deduct a star for installation problems is that I have seen the insides of plenty of computers and I can think of many specific ones where the VF700 would be either a tight or impossible fit. The heatsink protrudes well beyond the edge of your video card which helps to blow hot air past the card and hopefully will be expelled by other fans in the case or power supply. For the heatsink to fit your case has to have plenty of room where the video card resides and you will not be able to install a card in the slot neighboring the video card. Micro ATX cases are typically too cramped to fit the heatsink. It's also worth noting that if you inspect your video card and see large capacitors or other components around or near the factory heatsink you may not be able to use the VF700 because the copper blades don't offer much clearance from the PCB to allow anything other than surface mount circuits or very short components to fit without hitting the heatsink. In my case most of the memory chips were around the factory heatsink so the VF700 cleared those just fine. There was not enough clearance for the provided memory heatsinks to fit.

Great product if it will fit your PC.

Excellent! [Posted on 2007-07-07]
Having used this fan for almost 2 years for an extremely overclocked ATI X600XT (620Mhz Core/820Mhz Mem). It is amazing to push an 130nm core to such a high frequency. Excellent!

So far, So good [Posted on 2007-07-12]
I have an NVidia Geforce 7600 GS video card. For some time now it has been getting loud and making rattling noises. It took a while for me to narrow down where the noise was coming from, but when I did, I found out that lots of people hate those fans.

I have only had the new fan in for a couple of hours now, but so far it seems to be working great. And much quieter.

So Far I've Noticed:

- The fan is quiet (at least for my setting, not sure how it is using the higher setting)
- The fan was MUCH easier to install than I thought it would be
- The fan looks much nicer than the default fan

**NOTE** It needs a normal power connection, just like your Hard Drive(s), CD Drive(s), etc. I did not know this and had to get a power splitter since I only have 4 and they were all being used. So keep this in mind and plan ahead......Make sure you have enough power cords, and if not, get a splitter before it arrives.

Overall, I really like this fan so far. I wanted to leave a feedback for the seller, but there wasn't an option on here for it, so I'm leaving a review instead. :)

CPU Overheating problem [Posted on 2007-12-12]
If your have a high performance system and the attendant CPU overheating problems this is THE way to fix it! I'm REALLY impressed with both the ease of installation and the effectiveness of the product and that doesn't even mention that it is very much less noisy than the fan I replaced with it!

Great! [Posted on 2008-01-07]
My Sapphire X850XT stock cooler was sooo NOISY! This cooler not only removed the noise completely, but also dropped the temps about 10 degrees Celsius.

Click here for more details and discount information...