Redshift

Well as some of you know I bought an nVidia GeForce 7600GT back in October to replace my aging GeForce 5200 card that was slowly dying a slow and fairly painful death (It finally died on me when it started producing artifacts on-screen when in a game). So here’s what I have to say about the 7600GT after a month of use: It’s amazing. I know it’s not a top of the line card, I know it’s basically considered “last gen” because of the Geforce8 being out right now, But that doesn’t mean it isn’t still awesome. It does a fine job of running every source-based game I have maxed out at 1680×1050 (my new monitor’s native resolution), and it runs most newer games on medium fairly well so I’m happy. There was just one hitch with the card: The cooling system. Now when I bought this card, I didn’t pay attention to the cooler size because I’ve never had a video card that’s needed anything more than a fanless heat sink to cool it (like my 5200), but man that was a big mistake. The stock cooler on my card (Seen Here) is ridiculously tiny. The heat sink is literally non-existent and the fan did a horrible job of cooling it down, so I did what any boy with 40 bucks and semi-decent pc building skills would do: I bought the largest fan and heat sink I could afford that would fit on the card and shoved it on there. That Fan and heat sink being the Zalman VF700CU cooler. The thing is massive and is literally is bigger than the card (I’ll take a picture later), but it does such a good job of cooling the system that it makes up for size. Here’s what I mean: Stock cooler idle temp: 70 Degrees Celsius. Zalman Cooler idle temp: Between 38 and 43 Celsius. That’s one hell of a difference if I do say so myself. The load temps are about the same difference, if not more. So back on topic am I happy with my new card? Yes. Will I buy another EVGA card again? Yes. And yes, I’ll be using zalman in all of my builds from now on. And now I’m off to go play HL2: Deathmatch.