Thermalright Shaman 140mm 8 Heatpipe Video Card Cooler Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
1,101 words · ~5 min read
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today we have another VGA cooler from thermal right so this is the shaman or
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Shaman depending how you prefer to pronounce it and this is an 8 heat pipe
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VGA cooler it comes in their traditional cardboard box and let's go ahead and get
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this guy opened up and find out uh well
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what it's all about okay so the first thing we're going to find is a little
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exploded view that's uh acting as a few different things so first of all it is
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seems like it's an instruction guide oh no the instructions are on the back here
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for how to mount the shaman okay the example they've used is a GTX 480 you
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can tell from the PCB cutout for the fan although the GTX 480 uses most of the
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same mounting points as the GTX 580 so
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you'd have to check the thermal right site for confirmation but I would
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imagine it would also be compatible with the 580 now that that's released so you
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can see here are all the officially supported graphics card so wow it goes
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back as far as the 3850 and then up as current as the 480 and like I said I
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suspect that the 580 would also be supported okay here we've got a little
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contents list so what we're expecting to find inside and then the next thing we
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have is one of thermal right's 140 mm fans as I mentioned in one of my
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previous unboxings I have tried out this fan myself and I do quite like it so uh
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you can be confident in using that fan with your new Shaman that you are having
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the best experience possible in terms of a balance between air flow as well as
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noise so I went and put away the knife that I had just used here it is
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okay so let's get this opened up here
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this is the assembly package and inside
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we will find everything we need for assembly so we're going to find some of
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these little rubber strips which are for dampening the noise made by the fan okay
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cuz this is a performance as well as silence optimized product so thermal RS
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design goal when they're uh figuring out
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how to build the best aftermarket VGA cooler is they want to make it quieter
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and better performance than the OEM cooler so in order to achieve that they
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uh they have to put a lot of thought into it so these are one of the things
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that has come out of that particular design objective to reduce the overall
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noise made by your graphics card so here's a couple fan clips that you will
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also need to mount the fan onto the shaman all right we've got some thermal
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compound cf3 from thermal right chill factor 3 and then we have one set of
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mounting hardware wow that keeps it simple doesn't it so you've got your
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non-conductive backing on there so that's a plastic backing and then the
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metal is as I've come to expect from thermal Rite thick robust and made of
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steel so you're not going to have any issues with that back plate fxing on you
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here's a variety of mosfet as well as RAM
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coolers okay and let's get a little bit further
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in here wow this thing looks ridiculous actually
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that's awesome all right oh hey I missed the thermal right sticker there it
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is that's nice okay so by the time you
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put a fan on this guy it's going to be a triple slot cooling solution so as long
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as you're aware of that going into it bear in mind that triple slot isn't as
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big of a deal now as it used to be because there are so many Graphics so
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many motherboards out there that allow you to have two triple slot cards in SLI
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or Crossfire so bear that in mind if you are going to be adding a Shaman to your
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system shortly now this does use eight heat pipes and I just love this check
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this out the Maze of heat pipes over here looks outstanding here I want you
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to get a couple different angles of that because it just looks so cool to have
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all of those heat pipes just sort of bent around and wrapped around each
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other because I mean really we're talking about fitting all of these
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Precision manufactured so that they all kind of Bend in and around each other
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and they all go to the same BAS right here now look how big the Bas is on this
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compared to a CPU Cooler also we'll do the obligatory look how shiny it is and
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it does use a convex base look how big the base is compared to a CPU that's
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because a GPU die is typically quite a bit bigger so on a CPU it'd be hard to
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optimize it to actually make use of eight heat pipes lying side by side
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because the CPU die is so small and that's where all the heat comes from
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whereas the GPU die under that huge heat spreader is able to spread it out a
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little bit more so we can actually get more cooling performance by spreading it
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out so here is our hold down which you can see thermal right has thoughtfully
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provided screws for which you can actually use to remove the hold down and
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replace it with something else later when you want to upgrade your graphics
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card and then we've got the top here so these are all soldered down you can see
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like how low profile it is when I really hold it up this way and uh that's what
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here we'll go ahead and put the fan on it so you can see exactly how thick it
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is compared to a 100 standard so this is a 2 5 mil 140 mm fan just like that
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check that out again that looks so
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cool now in terms of performance I can't really speculate but I would go ahead
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and assume because thermal right designed it that it's going to pretty much Rock anything else and thank you
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for checking out my unboxing on the thermal right Shaman don't forget to
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