Date: October 23rd, 2006
Article by: Joe Anderson (Hardware Reviewer)
Edited by: Nathan Glentworth (Owner / Head Editor)
Product was submitted by: Apack
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PRODUCT INSTALLATION AND TESTING
After placing the screws through the holes, the brace (foam pad down) can be secured with the knurled nuts and tightened down. I was able to thread the nuts down until the bottomed on the threads, but caution should be exercised here. Too tight and you may hear the disconcerting sound of your GPU chip cracking.
All finished, and ready to roll. Like the GX700, the GX710 is dead simple to install. It has a great look and the ramsinks blend right in with the green board.
Let's see, low profile, easy to install, lightweight. So far, so good. Let's get this card installed and see how the ZEROtherm GX710 performs.
After placing the card back in its slot and plugging in the fan, I fired up the system and prepared to do a little testing.
I use my testbed rack to put cooler through their paces for a couple of reasons. It's easier, but more importantly this method removes the case as a variable. The following components were used during testing:
- DFI Lanparty nF4 SLI-DR Motherboard
- AMD Opteron 148 CPU @ 2.6 GHz.
- 512 MB X 2 G. Skill PC4400 DDR Ram
- Thermaltake Toughpower 750W PSU
- eVGA GeForce 6800 XT (ZEROtherm GX710 cooler)
- Western Digital WD800 SATA hard drive
- LG CDRW/DVD Combo drive
- Windows XP Pro SP2
Idle temperature was recorded after reboot and the system at desktop for 30 minutes. Load temperatures were recorded after three iterations each of AquaMark3 and 3Dmark05. A constant ambient temperature of 21C was maintained in the testing environment and the results are as follows:
Well, there seems to be no performance difference between the GX710 and its all-aluminum little brother. I had my doubts about the effectiveness of this design over the GX700. Not to say that the GX710 is a poor cooler, it did beat out the stock solution handily, but I think that the aluminum base can't keep up with the added performance of the copper fins. I liked the GX700 and I like the GX710, but one would have to surmise that the 710 is going to be more expensive. With identical performance, the 700 would have to be the better value with (presumably) a lower pricepoint.
