Date: January 9th, 2005
Article by: Joe Anderson (Hardware Reviewer)
Edited by: Nathan Glentworth (Owner / Head Editor)
Product was submitted by: Zalman USA
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PRODUCT PICTORIAL AND WALKTHROUGH
The base of the heatsink, while not mirror-polished is flat and smooth and should provide good heat transfer. If you've used other recent Zalman cooling products, the mounting system should look familiar. I really like this solution, and we'll give it more attention in the installation section of this review.
The ramsinks are aluminum and have a matching red finish. Thermal interface material is pre-applied and protected with blue plastic sheeting that is easily removed for installation.
The installation hardware is very well designed and installation requires only your fingers and a Phillips screwdriver. Clockwise from the top, you'll get:
- Rubber O-rings
- Nipples
- Brace plate
- Nipple screws
- Brace plate screws
The included Multi-Connector allows the FS-V7 to be attached to a 4-pin PSU connector and can provide either +12 (black) or +5 (white) to the fan. According to Zalman, the fan speed and noise are as follows:
Quiet Mode (+5V)
Fan Speed: 2050 rpm +/- 10%
Noise: 23.7 dB +/- 10%
Performance Mode (+12V)
Fan Speed: 3500 rpm +/- 10%
Noise: 36 dB +/- 10%
PRODUCT INSTALLATION AND TESTING
The first step in installing the FS-V7 is to uninstall the stock cooler from the graphics card. For this installation, the victim will be my eVGA e-GeForce 7800 GT CO 256MB graphics card. After removing the fan and heatsinks, seen in the background in the above photo, the GPU and RAM chips were cleaned with alcohol to remove any residue from the stock thermal interface material. This card came from the manufacturer with a copper heatsink and a very loud fan. It also comes overclocked at 470/1100 MHz (GPU/Memory frequency), up from the 400/1000 reference model.
