Aftermarket Fan Performance

Since the GFXChilla is compatible with nearly every other standard 80mm fan on the market we decided to go out and buy a pair of the least expensive ones we could find. We finally settled on a pair of Zalman ZM-F1 “Ultra Quiet” 80mm fans which cost us a mere five bucks each. Even though each of these fans is rated to spin up to 3000RPM, we manually set their speed to 2000RPM in order to keep noise to a manageable level.

Here are the results we achieved.



Right across all of the load tests, the Zalman fans lowered temperatures quite a bit over the stock fans. This puts the load temperature results right inline with those posted by the DuOrb while the overclock results are further lowered by about 3*C. As we saw before, the Zalmans are about twice the height of the stock fans but due to the limited height of the GFXChilla, they still have enough space to draw in cool air in an SLI setup.


Acoustical Footprint

One word comes to mind when thinking of the acoustical footprint of the GFXChilla: quiet. Even though it as two small 80mm fans, they only spin at a leisurely 2000rpm so they make next to no noise and even with the “upgraded” Zalman 80mm fans, near-silence was the name of the game. Considering the stock 8800GTS 512MB heatsink makes an unholy racket once a certain core temperature is reached, this Coolink cooler is head and shoulders above it in this department as well.

As for the competition, the DuOrb is quite a bit louder than the GFXChilla as well and the amount of noise produced by the HR-03 GT is largely dependant on which fan you pick for it and how quickly that fan is spinning. It should also be mentioned that not all 80mm fans are created equally and while we tried some cheaper fans, they kicked up such a racket, we quickly went back to the Zalmans. That being said, we believe that Coolink chose right with the low profile fans they used for this cooler.