The Products

Before we look at the main cooler it is worth looking at the memory heatsink. This is an optional component as the VF1000 LED comes bundled with small individual ramsinks however we would highly recommend that for expensive graphics cards the best cooling is employed, even if it does raise the cost slightly. One of the major reasons for this is the additional FET cooling that this product offers, however more on that shortly.

There are three parts to the aluminium heatsink and they are packaged securely in foam, on the left are the coolers for the FET components at the rear of the graphics card. One of these is designed for the 8800 GTX/Ultra and the other for the GTS. On the right side of the picture is the main part of the ZM-RHS88 and this cools all of the memory chips and the I/O chip at the front of the card.

The VF1000 LED is shown below and is a reasonably compact cooler which is made from pure copper (base/heatpipes/0.3mm fins). It weighs 380g and has dimensions of 160x100x30mm. As mentioned earlier in the article the fan used is a 1400-2500rpm model, the noise levels created by it are 18-28dBa and the 80mm diameter fins light up in blue due to the LED which sits in with the 2 ball bearing motor.

As we would expect from a Zalman product the base of the cooler is polished copper and looks perfectly smooth. Shown below there are also various attachment holes which extend from the base and ensure that the cooler can be installed on a number of card designs.