Hello,

Another mixed bag! And because of the dirth of video coolers, this article helps establish a format for SPCR reviews of video coolers?

Unfortunately, we had a minor disaster in the lab right after the testing for this HS was done: Our trusty old AOpen 6800GT vidcard died. We've done a fair number of reviews using this card as the vidcard or vidcard test platform, but of course, it is now discontinued. I spent a lot of time & effort trying to get one from sponsors, but no one had a 6800GT -- or any 6800s, in general. Online prices for the GT seemed outlandishly high; I ended up buying a 6800XT-128mb, hoping that its power characteristics are close enough to the GT for existing test results to be comparable to new test results. We'll find out; the card just arrived today.

Oh my!

According to Xbit Labs there's quite a difference between the 6800GT and the 6800...

What happened to the Accelero?

rpsgc -- you're saying 6800xt=6800?

No. I was just showing there's quite a difference between a 6800GT and a 6800NU. In this case a bigger one (6800XT: less pipes, less power consumption).

Well we'll find out what we have on our hands. In the meanwhile, let's get back on track -- this thread is supposed to be about the Systrin VF1 review, not 6800 vidccards...

I was reading the review and thinking... "will they test it passively?" but then I reached the results page and thought "guess not! "

Over the years I've owned many different devices that used this type of fan....they all suffered vibration problems. I use two tower-type fans in my house right now....both vibrate, even at low speeds. This leads me to suspect balancing these things is difficult, maybe not even attempted by the makers. Anybody ever seen any evidence of a balancing attempt on this type of fan?

I know that lateral fans are used in refrigerators to cool the coils some times, and most refigerators are designed to be fairly quiet.
Maybe Kennmore has ballenced fans in some of its models, or at least attempted to balance one.


some what unrelated, i found this when looking up lateral/crossflow fans.


www.fanwing.com

That FanWing thing looks interesting, and developed mostly here in the UK!

Theoretically cross-flow fans offer a good mix of static pressure and air volume for heatsink applications, and it shouldn't be impossible to balance the fans, which makes me think this is simply not a priority for current manufacturers; in this sense the field of quiet axial fans is much more advanced than for cross-flow fans, although neither type of fan is inherently superior than the other.

Great review. I still wager that my solution beats all others when it comes to cooling high W GPU's but I have to admit that it is not the most practical or economical to set up.

I tried doing a search for any of your posts concerning GPU cooling, but I didn't find anything that stood out as an exclusive solution. I'm hoping you could inform me as to what your solution is and what card you have (x1900xt?). Just curious, thanks for the response.

That should be rise.

In putting together a PVR that would ultimately be used with a widescreen monitor/TV, I bought a passively cooled Sapphire Radeon 9250 graphics card with 256MB of video RAM. However, the skimpy heatsink that came with it got extremely hot, suggesting that it was selected for price, rather than efficiency.

Reading between the lines on page 1 of this review, it seemed that the regular KuFormula VF1 (sans fan) might be a logical upgrade. In fact, this turned out to be the case. It dissipates heat from the Sapphire so effectively, that it barely gets warm to the touch. Highly recommended as used in this example.