We shall today take a close look at a new revision of an earlier popular cooler from the famous company Zalman. It is their latest graphics card cooler, ZM80C-HP. The earlier version is named ZM80A-HP, and you can read a review of it here. The difference from the earlier cooler is among other things that you can mount a fan on it and make this cooler active, what you benefit from this is to be found out during this review.

We shall today
take a close look at a new revision of an earlier popular cooler from the
famous company Zalman. It is their latest graphics card cooler, ZM80C-HP.
The earlier version is named ZM80A-HP, and you can read a review of it
here. The difference from the earlier cooler is among other things that
you can mount a fan on it and make this cooler active, what you benefit from
this is to be found out during this review.

The product seems
to be the dream for all who want to make their graphic cards silent, and the
great heat dissipation area should cool things down. Zalman are very famous
for their innovative and silent coolers for CPU. north bridge and GPU. Hopefully
the new revision will be better than the earlier one, click on to the next
page to read the specifications.

Specifications:
Zalman ZM80C-HP
Weight
325
grams
Heatpipe
Goldplated copper pipe
Material
Aluminium
Heat dissipating area yta
1200cm2
Accessories
Two
tubes with thermal paste, a screwdriver, additional screws/bricks and
a manual.
Estimated price

It feels like
Zalman has thought this through when they assembled this product. Everything
you might need, even an extra bag with such things that easily gets lost.
Can you imagine a better service? The enclosed screwdriver is nice, but I
think most people already have a screwdriver at home so it might not be the
most needed accessory. The two tubes of thermal paste is more than enough
for two mountings, if you would like to have the cooling on another graphics
card.

The instructions
are so simple that anyone can assemble the cooler, though a couple of extra
hands might be handy in certain moments. It comes with two sets of aluminium
blocks that are mounted onto the GPU itself, one which fits the GeForce4 cards
and one for all the other cards. The difference between the blocks is the
width.

The heatpipe is
a very important part in the design, a heatpipe is nothing more than a copper
tube filled with gas. The gas changes the aggregation state thus it transfers
the heat from the front heatsink to the back heatsink, doubling the area which
the heat can dissipate from. A genius construction which not only increases
the area, but also makes sure that the card gets more balanced through moving
the  center of gravity closer to the middle.

The free area
between the heatsink and the card is pretty big, but with those with large
RAM heatsinks might want to prepare for some light modification. It surprises
me that it doesn’t come with any heatsinks for the memory. You might at least
think that it should be available as an accessory to the GPU cooler. The cooler
also occupies the nearby PCI slot, fortunaley they aren’t used very much nowadays
so it should not be a problem.


Everything that is in the package

The package
Specifications:
Zalman ZM-OP1
Weight
75
grams
Size
80x80x15mm
Rotation speed
12v:
2800RPM 5v: 1400RPM
Level of noise
12v:33dB
5v: 20dB
Accessories
80mm
fan grill, Zalman multiconnector and all the screws/bricks that you
might need
Ca. price

The fan with
accessories goes under the name ZM-OP1, which you might interpret to
Zalman Option Package 1 if you read the text on packaging. Here you find
everything that is needed to convert the passive cooling to an active one: a
fan with accessories. Say what you want about passive cooling, but active
cooling is almost exclusevly more effective. Considering the size of the
heatsinks the low rpm of the fan should be enough, which is much quieter than
the ordinary graphics card coolers which exists today.

The fan grill
has a cut Zalman logo on it, wether it’s nice or not I leave to you. Since
the fan covers much more than the graphics card you get cooling on nearby
PCI cards for free and that’s always positive.


Everything in the package

 

I didn’t take
pictures during the installation, they simply would not give much. The manual
covers everything that you need to know and things often only fit in one way.
Pictures before and after is on the house, the card is a dusty Sapphire Radeon
9700 Pro. A quite large improvement I must say, as you can see there are no
heatsinks on this card.

The earlier
model was made of gold coloured copper, while this is made completely of
aluminium. At a first look it might show as a downgrade, but I suspect that
the material of choice has its reasons. First of all the weight is hardly 3/4
of the earlier model. This must be seen as a pretty big plus, since the risk
for damages while moving the computer is lessen. Furthermore the material is
cheaper, which reduces the price for the end customer. The materials heat
transfer capabilities are somewhat worse, but with the large area and an
eventual fan it should not be any problems.


Installed and everything

Without the fan

Enough talk
about the product, here are some results after the overclock. With the
standard fan it could only overclock 16MHz to 350 before it stopped, even when
I cleaned the fan out of dust. Therefore we lowered our expectations, but we
were positivly surprised when it went up all way to 378MHz before artifacts
started to show. This was with the fan at +12v, when we lowered the voltage to
the fan with 7v to 5v it handled 373MHz before graphic bugs appeared. Without
fan the overclock went to 365MHz, not bad for a totally passive cooling for a
9700 Pro.

Delta-T between
the two plates were between three and four degrees celcius, which shows that
the heatpipe is doing its job well. With a laser measurer the max temperature
on the front plate was measured after 5 loops of 3DMark 2003.

I must say that
I was positively surprised by this product. Zalman has really thought about
everything, it is compatible with most of the graphiccards and everything
that you might need is enclosed. It also looks brutal and cool, not to speak
about the performance that showed to be much better than the original fan.
The installation went quite easy, although it was a bit tricky at some places.
The heatpipe is great and doubles the total area which heat can dissipate
from.

The level of noise
is a very positive side of this product, without the fan it is completely
silent. With the fan you can adjust the noise, but even at max rpm it is
quieter than the stock cooling. Furthermore the noise is of a less annoying
character, it is a low frequent humming instead of a high frequent whine
noise.

Though all products
has their downsides, first of all it weighs alot which increases the risk
for damaging the computer while moving it. You also void your warranty on
your graphics card when mounting a cooling like this, and that it occupies
a PCI slot is not very good either. The biggest downside of this product is
the lack of matching RAM heatsinks, I’m convinced that such a addon kit would
be very popular.

The pros weighs
up the cons a lot, so I strongly recommend this cooling for those who are
tired of their high frequent noise graphics card cooling or who wants to overclock
some more.

Zalman
ZM80C-HP + Zalman ZM-OP1

Pros:
+ Very silent
+ Good cooling
+ Nice design

Cons:
– No RAM heatsinks
– Pretty expensive
– Occupies one PCI slot

Thanks to Zalman
who made this review possible.