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Akasa VORTEXX Neo Review I decided to get this cooler for my HD4850 as the Arctic Cooling TwinTurbo no longer fits with my Crossfire configuration. For whatever reason, it's extremely difficult to find any aftermarket dual-slot solution that exhausts from the case. As far as I know, this is the only one that works with the newer cards. Of course the fan and barbs do not come with it, I just took a picture of everything I got in the mail today :bleh:It came packaged in a rather large box which had the cooler itself, 8 pieces of thermal tape for the RAM, 6 plastic washers, 4 thumb-type screws, some thermal paste and a 3pin to molex fan adapter. It's a lightweight cooler with a mix of copper and aluminum. It has blue LEDs as well if your into that. The base though is rather rough so lapping it could possibly help with temperatures however since it's a stepped base I think that would be kind of hard to do without ruining proper contact. The installation was rather simple though the semi-thumbscrews used to hold the heatsink on cannot be put tight it seems otherwise the card bends a lot. Had to basically leave them hand-tight (even though it has a cut out for a flat-head screwdriver). One issue I have though is the MOSFETs are totally naked and the fan doesn't cover them, so this could be problematic. I haven't yet checked the temperatures on them with an IR gun though, but I might need to get some ramsinks. Here's a before and after shot: Unfortunately the fan uses a 3pin connector rather than plugging into the GPU itself so the GPU no longer controls the fan speed. This was something I liked with the TwinTurbo. Luckily it doesn't seem to be audible over my S-FLEX "F" fans so it's fine with me. As it stands, I'm idling at 40C which is totally amazing IMO. That's lower than my HIS ICEQ4 card as well which idles at 55C. 1 loop of 3DMark06 with the card running at 690/1100 yielded the following temperatures: 56C on the Core/DISPIO 64C on the MEMIO 55C on the SHADERCORE Overall a great cooler which exhausts the air out of the case. Something I wish more manufacturers would do. 1 word of advise, if your case doesn't already have vented slot covers, make sure you get at least 1 to use so that the cooler can exhaust out of the case. For whatever reason Akasa didn't include one which is disappointing. |
stupid HIS ICEQ4 55 degree idle BS.... nice find! |
Couple more pictures of it installed: http://i85.photobucket.com/albums/k7...x/DSC03882.jpg http://i85.photobucket.com/albums/k7...x/DSC03890.jpg |
anyplaces in canada have it? looks really nice too. |
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hmm. could you take a picture of what you want to put a heatsink on? bah it's like 58$ with shipping :( |
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And it's only $35.71USD shipped for me (to Toronto, ON) using First Class International. |
Looking good jdrom nice pics and great temps. You getting another for the HIS or is their heatsink good enough? EE |
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Well after 900s of FurMark (renamed so CCC doesn't slow it down), the MOSFETs and in general the back area of the card was only 50-60C depending on where I measured. So I think they'll be fine without heatsinks and we all know FurMark goes beyond what games do... One note though, the backside of the PCB where the core is, that got up to 94C however that's not really this coolers fault. The core itself was at 70C. |
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