Zalman VF 1000 LED VGA Heatsink Review

The stock cooler has a special 4-pin connection that allows the 8800 card to monitor the fan and adjust its rotation speed, but the Zalman uses a standard 3-pin connection, so it could not be directly connected to the card. Because of this, Zalman’s fan cannot be dynamically driven based on the card’s load, as the stock cooler does. While I like having the silence of low RPMs, I wouldn’t mind if the card sped up when running on overdrive… you could have your cake and eat it, too.

Even at high speed, the VF-1000’s fan isn’t very loud, but if you have an otherwise quiet system it can be heard slightly. Using the included FanMate to turn the RPMs down made this cooler completely silent. The small blue LEDs also scatter light across the fan blades evently, and looks rather nice. The blue LEDs dim slightly when the RPMs are lowered with the FanMate, but still lights up the fan evently and does not flicker.

The Zalman VF-1000/RHS88 combo cooler was tested on an eVGA 8800 GTS video card and XFX 7800 GT video card.

• Asus P5W Deluxe motherboard (Intel 975 chipset)
• Intel E6600 Core 2 Duo processor
• eVGA 8800 GTS 320MB PCI-e video card
• XFX 7800 GT 256MB PCI-e video card
• Soundblaster X-Fi Platinum
• 2GB Crucial Ballistix Tracer DDR2-800
• OCZ ProXstream 1000W Power Supply
• Lian Li V-1000 aluminum case

	Performance on 7800 GT cooler idle temp load temp stock cooler 116 158 FC-ZV9 low 107 136 FC-ZV9 hight 102 122 VF-1000 LED low 102 131 VF-1000 LED high 98 127 Performance on 8800 GTS cooler idle temp load temp stock cooler 145 169 VF-1000 LED low 139 155 VF-1000 LED high 135 149

At first, the Zalman cooler appeared to work a miracle with the 8800 as the initial idle temp started at 125 degrees. After several minutes, the temperature rose to a steady 139 degrees, which is only slighly better than eVGA’s beefy stock cooler. The cooler does a more admirable job when the fan is running full blast on the 8800.

The performance is more dynamic on other video cards. While the 7800 GT is still very powerful, it doesn’t generate the massive heat load of the 8800 series. On the 7800 series this cooler performed even better than Zalman’s excellent FC-ZV9 Fatal1ty VGA heatsink.

While the thermal dynamics may not be as great on the 8800, it is admirable that the VF-1000 is able to keep up with the card’s excessive demands.