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Introduction
Video card cooling hasn't done anything that remarkable lately. Since people started attaching socket CPUs to their video cards, we've only seen a handful of notable video card coolers. The Blue Orb, The Copper sink, and a couple other notable additions to the category, but they all do the same thing. They cool the CPU of the card, which, in a normal tower is on the bottom of the card. This is a reasonably effective method of cooling the card, as the CPU/GPU on it is the item generating most of the heat on it, but the heat sink is on the bottom of the card, facing down. Which means, the heat that rises (like all high school science graduates know, heat rises) has nothing to cool it!
Recently when talking with the boss at the site here, he mentioned High Speed PC, had some nifty stuff. So during my looking I came across their AGP Airlift. I had never seen this before, or anything even similar to it. This struck me as odd, as I have seen pretty much every cooler that has been around. It turned out the item was a really new addition for them, which is why I hadn't seen it before. So I decided to acquire one for testing.
Packaging/Construction
The cooler came packaged simply enough, in a medium sized shipping box, well packed with peanuts. (Lots of those things) The cooler was securely and safely packed in the middle of it all. In addition to the cooler, came a sheet printed up with the instructions on instillation for the unit. The packaging was pretty simple, as it wasn't a professionally pre-made unit, it didn't have fancy plastic bubble packing or anything else like that. It was simple, and effective.
The construction of the cooler amused me, quite frankly. It's effective in its simplicity. The unit consists of a 60x60x25mm fan attached with 4 small bolts to the top of a plastic base, which expands a little to sit atop of the video card, using 4 small rubber feet to sit on the video card. One really nice touch to the unit was the type of fan they picked. It uses the YS-Tech 60mm fan, one that many people are familiar with. It moves 26cfm of air, and attaches to the motherboard via a RPM monitoring 3-pin connector. On the off chance all your headers were used up on your board, those nice guys, decided to throw in a 3 to 4 pin adapter to make sure you could connect it to your system somewhere. It was a very nice touch.
Design Score: 1.75/2
>> Installation/Testing The Cooler
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