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

When installing the cooler, there is very little you need to worry about, if you've got a normal video card that comes in at about 95-110 mm tall from connector to edge of the card. You take the unit, set it down, plug it in and you're off and running. The instructions they show on the site don't lie; it's an idiot-proof install on a normal sized card.

Of, course, since I'm just plain cursed when it comes to computers (don't get me wrong, I'm great with them, I just have shit for luck) I ran into one seriously annoying glitch. I've got a low profile GeForce 2 MX video card in my computer. Which only leaves me 60mm of room to work with on the back of the card. Oops, the AGP Airlift is 80mm across the bottom, and when I try to work it, after turning it on, it falls off. After playing with it and some stress and bitching, whining, and complaining, I decided to do something about it. I e-mail them at HighSpeedPC.com, and wait for a response, which didn't take long at all. I had my response in my mailbox within the hour. That's what I call a good response time. The mail helpfully pointed me to a page on their site (here) where they mention this exact problem I'm having. This pissed me off more, because I had looked before and didn't see this link. On the page they explain how to fix the problem by pulling off 2 of the feet and moving them. Duh! Why didn't I think of that?

So I finally got it installed after my own stupidity held me back, hey, I never said I was the smartest man alive. Once I got it installed it seemed to work fine, humming away quietly against the annoying drone of my stupid delta fan. The only thing about the AGP airlift I did not like in the end was how it was installed. It just rests on the video card, meaning, only towers can use the card. Desktop users are out of luck, and along the same line, it is not secured in any way to the video card, meaning it will likely fall of if you move your tower much (meaning, if you're going to a LAN party, it won't make it.)

Installation Score: 2/3

Testing The Cooler

The next step in this process was seeing if the cooler actually worked. Here's what I Was running to test it on:

Asus A7V Mobo
Tbird 800@ 1GHz 1.85v
256MB Micron PC133
Creative Labs GF2MX 32MB
Windows 2000 Pro
Other stuff that's not important, too.

One note about that card: I like it, and I've tweaked it out some since I bought it. Here's a pic:

Attached to it is 2 Cool Tek's 60mm copper heat sink with a 60mm fan on it, plus some of their wing heat sinks for the memory, and a 40mm fan cooling that. Overkill? Likely, but it works.

I ran 2 sets of tests on the cooler/card in these conditions:
1) Heat Sink fans OFF and AGP Airlift OFF
2) Heat Sink fans ON and AGP Airlift OFF
3) Heat Sink fans ON and AGP Airlift ON
4) Heat Sink fans OFF and AGP Airlift ON

Then once I had the tests ready, I ran them twice. Once when the card was running at stock conditions, and once when the card was OC'd to its limit.

The tests were performed in a relatively controlled environment, with me watching the temps, to make sure they didn't vary that much out of stock. There was never more than a 1F (0.5c) variation during testing. The Temperatures on the card were taken with a pair of Compunurse units, with one attached to the back of the card above the GPU, and the other secured to the side of the card, touching the heat sink near the core. Temps were recorded after they reached stability.

Here are the numbers:

Stock Settings: (175 MHz core, 286 MHz RAM)

Pros & Cons

• Nothing else cools the back of your video card
• Quiet fan
• Instructions included

• Nothing secures it to the Video card
• Will likely fall off if system is moved
• Does not work on desktop systems

Conclusion

The Results? I'd say the unit worked as promised. The site states that they saw about a 3C drop in temps with the cooler in use, and from what my tests showed, it fell right into line with that thought.

I think this cooler is a downright nifty idea. Nothing else out there really thinks about the back of your video card, so this guy is definitely a first in that field. With a well built, and relatively simple design, this thing does its job admirably, and thanks to the YS Tech fan, its reasonably quiet.

Cooling Score: 4/5

An admirable unit for the first of its kind, maybe they'll refine the design somewhat and put out a new one.

Rating: 8/10 SystemLogistics

Re-Printed From SLCentral

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