Today I'm going to be unboxing the very first VGA cooler from Gelled Solutions.
Gelled has a huge lineup of fans. They've got some CPU coolers under their
belt. They have excellent thermal compound, but this is their first foray
into a VGA cooling solution. So, it has
dual UV blue fans, five power heat five
power heat pipes. I'm not sure what they mean by power heat pipes, but I can tell
you right now that the heat pipes will not consume extra power in your system.
That's right. If you have a GTX 480, the heat pipes will not make your power
consumption higher, so you don't have to worry about that. Support is pretty much
there for almost all current video. In fact, all current video cards. They even
have support for the 5850, 5870, the GTX
470, as well as the GTX 480. So, the compatibility list goes all the way back
to the 4800 series as well as the 9800 series for NVIDIA. So, that's pretty
darn good. Now, in terms of performance, Gellled claims, and here, let's see if I
can zoom in on this so that you can actually read it. Gellled claims on the
GTX 480. So, here's their Oh, here's their test bench. They are using uh Here
we are. Oh, wow. That's interesting. They're using someone else's CPU cooler
when they actually have their own CPU cooler. Very strange, but they're using
a GTX 480 from ASUS. And they're claiming that underload when you're
overclocked. So that's the uh the green bar here. It's almost 20° cooler than
the stock fan while running at I'm going
Yeah. while running at a much slower RPM. So you're going to get much better
acoustic performance out of the Icy Vision. So here is the Banchettto 101.
Interesting. So here is the stock. Yeah.
Okay. So they've just reiterated that again over here. Interesting. Here is
their overclock. A mild 800 MHz overclock, but still 72° at 2,000 RPM is
a lot better than 91° at 3300 RPM. So,
here we can see the back of the cooler. Here we can see the front of the cooler.
So, there's your dual uh what appear to be 92 mm fans, and they are UV blue.
Let's get this thing opened up. I've had enough of talking about the packaging.
Premium aluminum fins, pure copper base,
uh, dual S-shaped fans for 20% more air flow. H, okay. Ball bearing for long
lifetime, and they are Crossfire and SLI compatible. But something you will have
to watch out for is that this cooler does appear to be a triple slot cooler.
So, unless your system has the Oh, actually, hold on. Let's see if I think
it is a triple slot cooler. Okay, here just a moment here. So, here is a here
is a video card and here is the
cooler. So, yeah, this has got to be a triple
slot cooler. So, unless you've got the appropriate spacing. So, you can see
here I've got a motherboard that has one PCIe slot, two additional slots, another
PCIe slot, and two additional slots. So, if you had two of these coolers, you
would be effectively using all of the slots in this motherboard. So, just be
aware of that. All right. So, let's have a look at the
accessory package. First, we have Ooh, color instructions. Very, very nice.
Thank you, GED Solutions. I always appreciate a color instruction booklet.
These are great diagrams, too. I can tell right off the bat, they've gone and
shown you all of the necessary little steps where to install all the little
RAM syncs, everything that you need. They've got this is for the NVIDIA
series here, and then I'm guessing on the other side is going to be ATI
series. Yep, here's your ATI series instructions. All right. Very nice. So,
it's about a ninestep program to uh install your graphics card cooler. Here
they've got an adapter. So, the Icy
Whoops. I forgot what it's called. Yeah, the Icy Vision there. That's not that
complicated. The Icy Vision comes with one of these little proprietary video
card fan connectors, but you can go ahead and adapt it to either a three pin
fan connector or a Molex connector. So, even though it has two fans, you only
have to plug it in with one header. So, that's pretty handy. Okay. It includes
some GC2 thermal compound, which is this
color. Okay. Then, it also includes a
bunch of RAM sinks. So, those are here.
All right. So, these are lowprofile RAM sinks. So, I'm guessing these are the
ones that are going to go under the cooler itself. And the thermal pads are
not pre-applied, which honestly I don't really mind because it's not really much
easier to to peel off the backing and then stick it on than it is to just peel
off two sides of backing and put it on the the RAM sink. So, here are the
actual You can tell right away. These are 3M branded thermal pads. And then
they've also got another thermal interface for uh where did that guy go?
I saw it before. All right, here we have a multi.
Okay, let's just finish with this. So, we've got some washers here. These are
for making sure that nothing shorts out. We've got some more thermal interface
material. We have some bigger sinks,
some smaller sinks. So, basically, Galllet's making sure they got all their
bases covered, no matter what little chips you need to throw sinks on. Then,
we have all of the mounting screws and hardware for actually attaching the Icy
Vision to your video card. Then, we have a little GEID case badge. Thank you for
that. Then over here we have more stuff.
And if I can Oh, yeah. There it is. I knew I saw this somewhere. So, this is
what that long thermal strip was for. Um, this guy right here. So, let me just
adjust that. I'm wearing kind of a slippery shirt today. So, my camera isn't staying in place as well as I'd
like. So, that's going to be for VRM on one card or another. Then, we have the
actual hold down or back plate rather.
If I could get this out then that would be splendid. There we go.
And finally, one last little heat sink. Okay, so there's another heat sink. And
here is the back plate. Universal back plate by the look of things. So you got
lots and lots of different mounting holes in there. All right, let's have a look at the IC Vision itself. So here's
our two fans. These spin at 2,000 RPM, although there's no reason you couldn't
turn them down if you're content with having higher GPU temperatures and
you're more interested in just keeping the uh noise levels down. So you can see
we are using aluminum fins here. So, let's see how many heat pipes we have
going to each one of these uh thin arrays. So, we've got basically what
amounts to kind of two slim fans mounted
on two kind of uh I guess they're about each about the size of an 80 mm water
cooling radiator or so. So, you got three heat pipes going to this one and
then you've got one two heat pipes going
to this one right here. Yeah. Yeah, that's correct. So, there's actually
five heat pipes running through the base. And we'll do the obligatory finger
shot here where we show how shiny it is. It's not particularly shiny, although it
does look to be machined quite flat. The base is bit of a more of a matte finish,
whereas the heat pipes have actually got like a shiny polished finish to them. It
looks quite nice. And then, let me see if there's anything else to really show
you about it. Why don't I just sort of do some camera work here and just show you
the Icy Vision in all its glory here. You can kind of I haven't installed it
yet obviously, but you can sort of visualize what it'll look like on a GTX
480 if I do this. So there there's a 480
in its stock state and there's one with an Icy Vision. And if you happen to
already have Gelid Wing UV Blue fans, then this will go really well with it,
which I happen to have. So I'm uh I feel quite privileged to get my hands on the
Icy Vision. And uh yeah, I guess there's not too much more to say about it. What
it's really going to come down to is how well it performs. And hopefully I'll
have a chance to test it in the near future and show you guys my results. Thank you for checking out my unboxing
of the Gellid Solutions Icy Vision VGA
Cooler.