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The Card Cooler XT


Date
: 10/24/00 – 09:24:48 PM

Author
:

Category
: Cooling

Manufactor: The Card Cooler

Price: $34

Introduction

Everyone who claims to be an overclocker, knows that cooling is one of the most essential parts of running your overclocked item 100% safe and rockstable. The most important cooling takes place on the hardware itself, but most of the time altering the standard cooling means losing your precious warranty.

This is where the people from The Card Cooler jump into the scene with their latest invention ‘The Card Cooler XT’. This cooler not only lets you keep your warranty, it also cools down every single component in your case instead of only one piece.

The specifications

The Card Cooler XT is equiped with two 120mm fans blowing 138 cfm (!!) of air over your computer parts and all this airflow is only producing 35.5dB per fan. To achieve this kind of low-noise performance, the Card Cooler guys are using Sunon’s low speed (2400 rpm) ball bearing fans. Please note that they are using ball bearing fans, which are indeed a tad noisier then a cheaper sleeve bearing fan, but they will last much longer. This king of the system coolers does not draw your power supply empty because it is only consuming about 2.4 watts per fan. Another important and cool thing about this king of the systemcoolers, is that it is equiped with fan grills so your children or pets (as if you never stuck your noisy finger is some sort of rotating device) don’t lose an arm or something else of great importance. The fans are connected to your p/s with a standard molex connector, and they have the ability to connect another device to them, so you will not lose a molex connector to the cooler. One last cool bit about the Card Cooler XT: the fans are mounted on some nice looking blue adonized brackets which work very well. The fans also have that cool penguin sticker all over them ;).

Installation

This is probably the easiest piece of cooling equipement I have ever installed. You just align the cooler with the bolts that hold your cards, loosen them a bit, slide the brackets behind it and retighten the bolts. Now you unplug a molex connector from your cdrom or hard drive. One end of the Card Cooler XT is plugged into that molex connector you just disconnected, the other end is plugged into your hard drive or cdrom so they also get some power. That’s it … the installation is all done now and it’s time to close your case and boot your computer.

The Test

Good stuff

I installed the Card Cooler XT in my main computer, an AMD Thunderbird 1GHz processor. As you probably all know, these chips are known to get very warm even at default speed. Before the Card Cooler XT ws installed, my case temp reached as high as 35 degrees celcius, where now the maximum readout I had was 28 degrees celcius! The CPU temp was also lowered by as much as 11 degrees celcius which I think is a very good achievement. It is said that your cpu lifetime is doubled with every drop of 10 degrees celcius. I can not confirm this since I have never had a CPU long enough to see it die of natural causes, but I think it is very logical that a cool running cpu is always of great importance.

So far you learned this cooler has not only brought down the case temperature, but also the processor temperature. This success story has not finished yet. Those who read the ‘About us’ section know that I am using a Hercules Geforce GTS 64MB in my system. This great videocard has already a small heatsink + fan on the core and passive heatsinks on the memory. But since no (not much anyway) air is flowing over the heatsinks on both the core and the memory, I could not overclock above 410MHz on the memory and 245MHz on the core before I installed this mofo, but now I can run stable and without artifacts at 250/420 core/memory!! I am aware of the fact that those 5MHz won’t be very noticable, but in my book every MHz you get for free is good :).

Bad stuff

There are some minor things I don’t like about this cooler. First there is the fact that you always have to remove the cooler if you want to exchange or replace some card or cpu in your system. Especially for people like me who alter something inside their PC several times a week, this can be a pain in the ass. Secondly, The Card Cooelr XT is actually circulating the air in your case and is NOT pulling cool air from outside your case. This means that if you do not have another fan pulling cool air in, the Card Cooler will only blow hot air on your components. Because of its size it is also possible this giant cooler won’t fit in some midi towers, so make sure you it will fit properly before buying it!

Conclusion

The Card Cooler XT has really amazed me, since I was a little skeptical about it in the beginning. But now after using it for almost a week I am truly amazed by its performance. My components are running way cooler and I am able to overclock them even more thanks to this great invention.

If you are looking for a non-warranty-voiding solution that will cool down all of the stuff in your case without waking up your neighbours when you boot up at 3AM, because decided you want to play one last game of Quake 3 before going to bed (and then you see the sun rises all of the sudden ;)), then this cooler is what you are looking for. And it’s not expensive either!

Thanks to our buddies @ The Card Cooler for supplying us with this review unit!