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:

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.