Zalman Heatpipe VGA Cooler (ZM80C-HP) & Optional Fan (ZM-OP1)

Reviews: Cooling

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Kurtis Kronk
Brian
Case-Mod
Mar. 3, 2004

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First Looks

At first glance, the Zalman Heatpipe VGA Cooler looks enormous, at least for a VGA cooler. Of course, I had already seen pictures of the cooler, so I wasn't surprised, but it is definitely a beast. Judging from the size and the design of this cooler, I have high expectations for its performance. Included with the cooler are the heatsinks, the mounting blocks, the heatpipe, a screwdriver, a Zalman case badge sticker, some thermal paste and various screws. The ZM-OP1 is an optional fan which connects to the VGA cooler for extra cooling power. The ZM-OP1 comes with the fan with pre-installed grill, screws, and a molex conversion cable that lets you power the fan (and others) at either 5V or 12V.

Installation

Thankfully, Zalman put together a very helpful installation manual (in English & Korean) which shows the rather complicated process of attaching this hunk of metal to your graphics card. The manual holds your hand through the entire installation process so I won't bother going into any of the details of installation. I will, however, say that it took me around 30 minutes to remove the stock cooler and install the Zalman cooler.

A couple things to note: Zalman does not recommend using this cooler on high-end video cards such as the 9800 Pro/XT or FX 5900/5950 Ultra. These cards should have some sort of memory cooling, which this cooler does not provide. Interestingly enough, Sapphire uses heatpipe cooling on their Ultimate 9600XT and 9800XT graphics cards. The cooler they use though is basically a slightly modified (has pretty Sapphire logo!) version of Zalman's, with the addition of some heatsinks on the RAM (which would explain why they use it on their 9800XT). Zalman also recommends removing the PCI slot cover on your case directly below the AGP slot. They claim that it will lower your card temperatures by a few degrees Celsius, we'll see if this holds true in our testing!

About Heatpipe Cooling

With the Zalman cooler you receive two sets of mounting blocks, one for ATI, one for NVIDIA. You start off by mounting the appropriate "front' block onto your card. Next, you will screw the "back' block onto the parts of the front block that are protruding through the card's mounting holes. The back block is basically there to give support to the rest of the cooler, as you will see in a moment... The next thing is to install the heatpipe. Once the heatpipe is in place, you can proceed by screwing the "front' heatsink into the front block. Now just do the same with the "rear' heatsink. You can now see that the purpose of the heatpipe is to actually transfer heat from the front around to the back for a greater surface area which means greater cooling capacity, I'll go into more detail in a second... Notice that through this whole process, nothing was ever installed to cool the RAM. It would be nice if Zalman bundled some heatsinks to cool the RAM for the high-end cards, but they didn't, oh well.

The way the heatpipe works is that it actually has a liquid in it. While the front heatsink gets hotter, the liquid inside the heatpipe vaporizes, and the cooler back side draws the vapor toward it. The warm vapor transfers heat through the heatpipe to the back heatsink, and once it turns back to liquid, it goes back to the front, and so on...

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Page 1: Introduction
Page 2: First Looks, Installation, & How Does Heatpipe Cooling Work?
Page 3: Testing, Conclusion, & Extra Images

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8 User Comments

1 - Posted by EmoMakesMeCry on March 5, 2004 - 8:49 pm

i've been looking for a good vga cooler to replace the stock one on my 9800, but this one just looks too bulky to keep on it with all the LAN parties i go to and such. sure does look beasty though, lol.

2 - Posted by Kurtis on March 5, 2004 - 9:25 pm

its not made for the high end cards either, unfortunately, since it does not cool the RAM.

3 - Posted by Guest on March 6, 2004 - 5:51 pm

You can get ram sinks in addition to the Zalman cooler...

4 - Posted by Kurtis on March 7, 2004 - 7:25 pm

Well yeah... but it would be nice if it came with it...

5 - Posted by Guest on March 9, 2004 - 5:58 pm

It would be nice if the fan came with it too... but it doesn't.

6 - Posted by Kurtis on March 9, 2004 - 6:15 pm

Yeah... unfortunately the fan will cost you $10, but in all honesty it does a great job. When you set it at 5V you can't even hear it, but the temperature still decreases a few degrees Celsius. When it comes to cooling, I always spend a few extra bucks for the good stuff...

7 - Posted by sa133 on March 30, 2004 - 10:39 pm

Kurt,
are you certain this thing isn't able to cool a FX5900?
Zalman's spec sheet says it can with the optional fan.
I think you could try it? and help us poor college students out.
BTW I'm runnin a FX5900 stock(55C at idle, 66C at load) and the sound IS drivin me crazy.
thanks

8 - Posted by Kurtis on March 30, 2004 - 11:21 pm

sa133: The problem is that it does not cool the RAM on the video card. Sure, you could remove the stock cooling and mount it there if you would like, but the RAM will most likely need some sort of cooling as well. If your card has cooling for the RAM stock, then it is recommended that you get some RAMsinks in addition to the Zalman cooler. Hope that helps.

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