The good guys at the Danish company Studiedata
were kind enough to send me one of the new Zalman Heatpipe video card coolers
for a review. There are two versions of this cooler available, namely the big
ZM80-HP and the somewhat smaller ZM50-HP. They are the world’s first 100% silent
video card coolers with heatpipe technology. The ZM80-HP is designed for high-end
video cards such as nVidia GeForce 3 + 4 and ATI Radeon 8500, whereas the ZM50-HP
is designed for ATI Radeon 7000, 7200, 7500 and nVidia GeForce2 MX, GeForce4
MX and slower cards. From this point on I will only refer to the ZM80-HP.
Materials and technology
The bases (plates) all consist of aluminum (6063T5), while the heatpipe
is a gold plated copper tube. Total unit weight is up to 385g, so it is no light
cooling solution. Heat dissipation area is (according to Zalman) 1000cm2.
The cooler is fanless, so it is completely silent. Instead of fans, it uses
its heatpipe to move the heat from the base on the GPU onto all the other aluminum
plates. (There are 4 all together: 2 small and 2 large). The base is fairly
flat and polished, but there is no mirror-finish. It is important to use the
thermal paste to improve contact between the plates.
In the box
Zalman has included these items in the box:
Two large aluminum plates
Two different sized base sets where only one of them is
to be used
A heatpipe
A screwdriver
A manual (in English and Korean)
Two small bags of bolts, rubber rings and Zalman thermal
paste.
All you need to install the cooler is already in the box.
No need to use any other tools, except maybe for removing the current video
card cooler and cleaning up the base.
Contents of the box
The base. Notice the arms that will hold the baseplate in place later on.
