Copper VGA cooler from PC-Look
Price: 11,99 € (eh?)

PC-Look have supplied us with a very nice looking heatsink for your graphics
chipset, made from a good chunk of conductive copper and at a very cheap price.
The specs are as follows:
External Appearance Size : 55.8 mm x 55.8 mm x 14 mm
Fan Size : 50 mm x 50 mm x 10 mm
Technology : Ball Bearing
Performance : 10.25 CFM
Rotation : 4500 RPM
Noise : 28 dBA
Power : 1.56 Watt (12 volts)
Connection : 3 conductors cable with 3 pins female connector
Male 3 pins connector - Male and Female Molex 4 pins connectors
Speed Monitoring : Yes
4 plastic pins and 4 installation screws (1 spare of each)
3 Installation Metal Clips
Thermal Paste

The first thing you notice about this package is that it’s
very heavy; this is of course because the bulk of the heatsink is made from
copper. The fan may look as if it’s copper but sadly it’s just been
sprayed with copper paint to give a copper effect. As you can see in the picture
you are provided with three clips, a molex adapter and some thermal paste alongside
the heatsink and fan.

The instructions for fitting are listed on the back of the package
and are relatively straight forward. The pic below gives you a clearer idea
of what you get for your euros...

Now let’s get on to the interesting stuff, looking at the
actual heatsink. I took a few minutes to construct the heatsink which basically
involves screwing the fan down on the base and picking a suitable clip.

Above: The heatsink base

Above: The metal clip positioned in the heatsink base

Above: The 12v fan before being screwed to the base
The only real problem I had at this stage was getting the screws
to fully screw into the copper. I found I had to tap the screws in with a hammer,
this perhaps shows the quality of this HSF isn’t all it could be.

I applied the provided silver thermal paste to the chip of my
Geforce 3 before clipping the heatsink into place. As you can see below it almost
didn't fit and the clip had to be forced between the ram sinks.

This heatsink has it's good points, for a start its made from
copper which is much more conductive than your normal aluminium heatsink.
Below is a table of the conductivites of metals:
Aluminum
|
210 |
Copper |
386 |
Silver |
406 |
Gold |
293 |
It also looks good which is important to some people, although in reality you
don’t see much of it unless you have a case window. It's also very cheap
and will defiantly out perform your bog standard heatsink provided with your
graphics card. The fact that you get 3 different clips means that it will fit
most graphics cards without a problem but as you saw with my card it can still
be a close fit. The molex adapter and the thermal paste were a nice addition
to round the package off and to get you up and running nice and quick.
The bad points I found were that the build quality could have
been much better, for example the screws didn't fit and the actual fan felt
a bit liable to snapping. The Copper VGA cooler is still a great buy and it's
well worth considering if you want to replace your standard chip cooler.
It's available to buy over at PC-Look along
with loads of other computer related bits.
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