I tend to replace my video card every couple years, to keep up with the requirements of the newest games. I always sell my prior hardware on ebay, to offset the cost of the upgrade. It’s always been a smooth process. I’ve mostly stuck with eVGA’s offerings, though recently I jumped from an eVGA 260 GTX to a Galaxy 560 GTX 2GB. I’ve never had any major issues with the hardware I’ve picked, but there has been one to consistently bug me with the last 4 cards I’ve owned: the coolers they come with.
eVGA has a tendency to go with these shuttle coolers that are always noisy, and don’t really have a logical airflow design. I don’t understand why this type of cooler has become so standard. It looks nice, but the air just doesn’t seem to flow. You’ve got a fan with blades that aren’t sloped to push air in a direction, but rather they just sort of shuffle air around inside the shuttle, in hopes that some will push out and some will pull in. You can always try feeling the back of your case where the video card’s exhaust is, and to no one’s surprise, you feel just the faintest amount of heat pushing out, even under full load.
This design is also notorious for collecting dust inside, even to the point where canned air is no match for the kind of clogs that can accumulate inside the labyrinth of heatsink blades. You can try blasting from the front or back, and often the lumps of dust have no means of escape and it requires a full dissemble to clean.
That card, and I assume others, have a stupidly messy paper-mache type of RAM cooling affixed to the chips. Good luck mounting the cooler on more than once without smearing that gunk all over. Finding suitable ram cooling pads online can be a bit of a pain as well. You can opt for the pink silly-putty stuff, which works pretty well and can be reused a couple times.
As for my new Galaxy 560 GTX 2GB, the heatsink and fan design is quite brilliant. The fans can swing out and cleaning is easy as pie. However, the heatsink isn’t mounted very well to the GPU. Under full load I’m breaking 65C, which is still perfectly safe, but if this cooler was seated closer to the GPU, we’d be seeing much lower temps. I confirmed the issue by taking the cooler off, cleaning the surfaces, applying a thin layer of XIGMATEK grease, remounting the cooler, then taking it back off and looking at the GPU. It was only making contact with the left and right edges of the GPU. The vast majority of the core wasn’t even touching the cooler. This is ridiculous.
There’s two solutions. I can either coat the GPU heavily in grease, or I can take a freakin’ dremel to the screw hole mounts. Something tells me I would only make the situation worse if I took the latter route. I went with option #1. So far my temps seem to max out around 61C, so that was a slight improvement. It’s a shame that the video card cooling market has dried up. Zalman used to make some killer solutions, like this. I absolutely love their cooler on my Intel Core i7.
Here’s hoping that someday we’ll see manufacturers focus more on the hunks of metal they slap on their fancy chips.
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