Reviews for Zalman Fatal1ty FS-V7 VGA Cooler

Good VGA Cooling Option

Strengths: Good heat reduction, quiet, Zalman design.

Weakness: Installation has its quirks, though not difficult.

Bottom line: the video card runs hotter than even the CPU with stock cooling. Zalman has a fan that solves this problem with minimal noise.

Installation: I don't like that the crossbar (the bar to which the fan screws through to) makes contact with one of the memory heatsinks. This prevents the heatsink from sticking to the memory evenly. This only occurs for one of the 10 heatsinks. I had a hard time removing my ATI AIW X800 AGP stock cooler, but that's not a problem with this product. You need some patience when working on a project like this.

The cooling results were very good. My temps were about 80-84C at load before I installed this, and afterwards, temps stayed around 70-74C. This isn't dramatic, but nonetheless meaningful. I also happened to use Artic Silver for thermal compound. The idle temps were similar in improvement, dropping about 10C (45-50C down to 35-40C). The noise is low and easily drowned out by a couple other fans (which are relatively quiet). Also note, I didn't use the performance setting for the fan. There are two voltage options for the fan, and I went with low speed because the high speed option is too loud for me. I tried the high speed out and temps didn't change much to justify the noise.

I wish I could say the cooling was more effective, but I'm still happy with its performance. I actually wonder if temps are better now that the Artic Silver has settled. ATI cards are made to run over 80C just fine, but I am glad to reduce that heat margin, and it definitely improves overall case temps in the long run.

Oh, about the red paint job. It's nothing special really. If you can get the non-Fatal1ty model for cheaper, go ahead. This kind of product doesn't need fancy paint or an LED fan. I use it with a 7000B-CU CPU fan (non-Fatal1ty) in a LianLi V1000A-Plus case.

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Fatal1ty VGA Fan

Strengths: Keeps Card A good 10c Cooler

Weakness: none found

Just recieved the Fatal1ty VGA Fan today and installed it with no problems , the memory coolers are nice as well.
Keeps my Vid card 15c Cooler then stock.
While overclocking this fan still keeps card nice and cool.

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Zalman Fatal1ty FS-V7

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