GELID Solutions Icy Vision Dual Fan VGA Cooler Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
1,580 words · ~7 min read
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Today I'm going to be unboxing the very first VGA cooler from Gelled Solutions.
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Gelled has a huge lineup of fans. They've got some CPU coolers under their
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belt. They have excellent thermal compound, but this is their first foray
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into a VGA cooling solution. So, it has
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dual UV blue fans, five power heat five
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power heat pipes. I'm not sure what they mean by power heat pipes, but I can tell
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you right now that the heat pipes will not consume extra power in your system.
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That's right. If you have a GTX 480, the heat pipes will not make your power
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consumption higher, so you don't have to worry about that. Support is pretty much
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there for almost all current video. In fact, all current video cards. They even
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have support for the 5850, 5870, the GTX
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470, as well as the GTX 480. So, the compatibility list goes all the way back
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to the 4800 series as well as the 9800 series for NVIDIA. So, that's pretty
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darn good. Now, in terms of performance, Gellled claims, and here, let's see if I
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can zoom in on this so that you can actually read it. Gellled claims on the
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GTX 480. So, here's their Oh, here's their test bench. They are using uh Here
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we are. Oh, wow. That's interesting. They're using someone else's CPU cooler
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when they actually have their own CPU cooler. Very strange, but they're using
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a GTX 480 from ASUS. And they're claiming that underload when you're
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overclocked. So that's the uh the green bar here. It's almost 20° cooler than
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the stock fan while running at I'm going
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Yeah. while running at a much slower RPM. So you're going to get much better
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acoustic performance out of the Icy Vision. So here is the Banchettto 101.
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Interesting. So here is the stock. Yeah.
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Okay. So they've just reiterated that again over here. Interesting. Here is
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their overclock. A mild 800 MHz overclock, but still 72° at 2,000 RPM is
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a lot better than 91° at 3300 RPM. So,
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here we can see the back of the cooler. Here we can see the front of the cooler.
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So, there's your dual uh what appear to be 92 mm fans, and they are UV blue.
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Let's get this thing opened up. I've had enough of talking about the packaging.
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Premium aluminum fins, pure copper base,
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uh, dual S-shaped fans for 20% more air flow. H, okay. Ball bearing for long
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lifetime, and they are Crossfire and SLI compatible. But something you will have
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to watch out for is that this cooler does appear to be a triple slot cooler.
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So, unless your system has the Oh, actually, hold on. Let's see if I think
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it is a triple slot cooler. Okay, here just a moment here. So, here is a here
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is a video card and here is the
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cooler. So, yeah, this has got to be a triple
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slot cooler. So, unless you've got the appropriate spacing. So, you can see
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here I've got a motherboard that has one PCIe slot, two additional slots, another
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PCIe slot, and two additional slots. So, if you had two of these coolers, you
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would be effectively using all of the slots in this motherboard. So, just be
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aware of that. All right. So, let's have a look at the
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accessory package. First, we have Ooh, color instructions. Very, very nice.
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Thank you, GED Solutions. I always appreciate a color instruction booklet.
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These are great diagrams, too. I can tell right off the bat, they've gone and
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shown you all of the necessary little steps where to install all the little
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RAM syncs, everything that you need. They've got this is for the NVIDIA
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series here, and then I'm guessing on the other side is going to be ATI
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series. Yep, here's your ATI series instructions. All right. Very nice. So,
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it's about a ninestep program to uh install your graphics card cooler. Here
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they've got an adapter. So, the Icy
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Whoops. I forgot what it's called. Yeah, the Icy Vision there. That's not that
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complicated. The Icy Vision comes with one of these little proprietary video
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card fan connectors, but you can go ahead and adapt it to either a three pin
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fan connector or a Molex connector. So, even though it has two fans, you only
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have to plug it in with one header. So, that's pretty handy. Okay. It includes
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some GC2 thermal compound, which is this
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color. Okay. Then, it also includes a
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bunch of RAM sinks. So, those are here.
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All right. So, these are lowprofile RAM sinks. So, I'm guessing these are the
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ones that are going to go under the cooler itself. And the thermal pads are
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not pre-applied, which honestly I don't really mind because it's not really much
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easier to to peel off the backing and then stick it on than it is to just peel
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off two sides of backing and put it on the the RAM sink. So, here are the
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actual You can tell right away. These are 3M branded thermal pads. And then
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they've also got another thermal interface for uh where did that guy go?
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I saw it before. All right, here we have a multi.
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Okay, let's just finish with this. So, we've got some washers here. These are
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for making sure that nothing shorts out. We've got some more thermal interface
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material. We have some bigger sinks,
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some smaller sinks. So, basically, Galllet's making sure they got all their
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bases covered, no matter what little chips you need to throw sinks on. Then,
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we have all of the mounting screws and hardware for actually attaching the Icy
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Vision to your video card. Then, we have a little GEID case badge. Thank you for
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that. Then over here we have more stuff.
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And if I can Oh, yeah. There it is. I knew I saw this somewhere. So, this is
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what that long thermal strip was for. Um, this guy right here. So, let me just
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adjust that. I'm wearing kind of a slippery shirt today. So, my camera isn't staying in place as well as I'd
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like. So, that's going to be for VRM on one card or another. Then, we have the
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actual hold down or back plate rather.
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If I could get this out then that would be splendid. There we go.
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And finally, one last little heat sink. Okay, so there's another heat sink. And
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here is the back plate. Universal back plate by the look of things. So you got
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lots and lots of different mounting holes in there. All right, let's have a look at the IC Vision itself. So here's
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our two fans. These spin at 2,000 RPM, although there's no reason you couldn't
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turn them down if you're content with having higher GPU temperatures and
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you're more interested in just keeping the uh noise levels down. So you can see
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we are using aluminum fins here. So, let's see how many heat pipes we have
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going to each one of these uh thin arrays. So, we've got basically what
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amounts to kind of two slim fans mounted
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on two kind of uh I guess they're about each about the size of an 80 mm water
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cooling radiator or so. So, you got three heat pipes going to this one and
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then you've got one two heat pipes going
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to this one right here. Yeah. Yeah, that's correct. So, there's actually
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five heat pipes running through the base. And we'll do the obligatory finger
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shot here where we show how shiny it is. It's not particularly shiny, although it
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does look to be machined quite flat. The base is bit of a more of a matte finish,
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whereas the heat pipes have actually got like a shiny polished finish to them. It
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looks quite nice. And then, let me see if there's anything else to really show
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you about it. Why don't I just sort of do some camera work here and just show you
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the Icy Vision in all its glory here. You can kind of I haven't installed it
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yet obviously, but you can sort of visualize what it'll look like on a GTX
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480 if I do this. So there there's a 480
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in its stock state and there's one with an Icy Vision. And if you happen to
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already have Gelid Wing UV Blue fans, then this will go really well with it,
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which I happen to have. So I'm uh I feel quite privileged to get my hands on the
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Icy Vision. And uh yeah, I guess there's not too much more to say about it. What
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it's really going to come down to is how well it performs. And hopefully I'll
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have a chance to test it in the near future and show you guys my results. Thank you for checking out my unboxing
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of the Gellid Solutions Icy Vision VGA
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Cooler.