today we have another VGA cooler from thermal right so this is the shaman or
Shaman depending how you prefer to pronounce it and this is an 8 heat pipe
VGA cooler it comes in their traditional cardboard box and let's go ahead and get
this guy opened up and find out uh well
what it's all about okay so the first thing we're going to find is a little
exploded view that's uh acting as a few different things so first of all it is
seems like it's an instruction guide oh no the instructions are on the back here
for how to mount the shaman okay the example they've used is a GTX 480 you
can tell from the PCB cutout for the fan although the GTX 480 uses most of the
same mounting points as the GTX 580 so
you'd have to check the thermal right site for confirmation but I would
imagine it would also be compatible with the 580 now that that's released so you
can see here are all the officially supported graphics card so wow it goes
back as far as the 3850 and then up as current as the 480 and like I said I
suspect that the 580 would also be supported okay here we've got a little
contents list so what we're expecting to find inside and then the next thing we
have is one of thermal right's 140 mm fans as I mentioned in one of my
previous unboxings I have tried out this fan myself and I do quite like it so uh
you can be confident in using that fan with your new Shaman that you are having
the best experience possible in terms of a balance between air flow as well as
noise so I went and put away the knife that I had just used here it is
okay so let's get this opened up here
this is the assembly package and inside
we will find everything we need for assembly so we're going to find some of
these little rubber strips which are for dampening the noise made by the fan okay
cuz this is a performance as well as silence optimized product so thermal RS
design goal when they're uh figuring out
how to build the best aftermarket VGA cooler is they want to make it quieter
and better performance than the OEM cooler so in order to achieve that they
uh they have to put a lot of thought into it so these are one of the things
that has come out of that particular design objective to reduce the overall
noise made by your graphics card so here's a couple fan clips that you will
also need to mount the fan onto the shaman all right we've got some thermal
compound cf3 from thermal right chill factor 3 and then we have one set of
mounting hardware wow that keeps it simple doesn't it so you've got your
non-conductive backing on there so that's a plastic backing and then the
metal is as I've come to expect from thermal Rite thick robust and made of
steel so you're not going to have any issues with that back plate fxing on you
here's a variety of mosfet as well as RAM
coolers okay and let's get a little bit further
in here wow this thing looks ridiculous actually
that's awesome all right oh hey I missed the thermal right sticker there it
is that's nice okay so by the time you
put a fan on this guy it's going to be a triple slot cooling solution so as long
as you're aware of that going into it bear in mind that triple slot isn't as
big of a deal now as it used to be because there are so many Graphics so
many motherboards out there that allow you to have two triple slot cards in SLI
or Crossfire so bear that in mind if you are going to be adding a Shaman to your
system shortly now this does use eight heat pipes and I just love this check
this out the Maze of heat pipes over here looks outstanding here I want you
to get a couple different angles of that because it just looks so cool to have
all of those heat pipes just sort of bent around and wrapped around each
other because I mean really we're talking about fitting all of these
Precision manufactured so that they all kind of Bend in and around each other
and they all go to the same BAS right here now look how big the Bas is on this
compared to a CPU Cooler also we'll do the obligatory look how shiny it is and
it does use a convex base look how big the base is compared to a CPU that's
because a GPU die is typically quite a bit bigger so on a CPU it'd be hard to
optimize it to actually make use of eight heat pipes lying side by side
because the CPU die is so small and that's where all the heat comes from
whereas the GPU die under that huge heat spreader is able to spread it out a
little bit more so we can actually get more cooling performance by spreading it
out so here is our hold down which you can see thermal right has thoughtfully
provided screws for which you can actually use to remove the hold down and
replace it with something else later when you want to upgrade your graphics
card and then we've got the top here so these are all soldered down you can see
like how low profile it is when I really hold it up this way and uh that's what
here we'll go ahead and put the fan on it so you can see exactly how thick it
is compared to a 100 standard so this is a 2 5 mil 140 mm fan just like that
check that out again that looks so
cool now in terms of performance I can't really speculate but I would go ahead
and assume because thermal right designed it that it's going to pretty much Rock anything else and thank you
for checking out my unboxing on the thermal right Shaman don't forget to
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