The hardest part of the whole installation of the Coolforce has nothing to do with Spirecoolers at all. It involves the battle to pull the stock fan off of your video card. We installed this fan on 2 different video cards and it was a battle to take the fan off each time. Once the fan is off though (normally with a sickening crunching sound) installation is a snap.
The first thing you have to do is remove all the leftover thermal paste that remains on the VGA chipset. This is important so be sure to do a good job. When everything is clean, apply the thermal paste and seat the fan on top of the chipset, locking it in place with the provided Push-Pins. Plug the fan into your motherboard and you are good to go….in theory. You see, we hit a slight snag with the installation of this fan on our Powercolor 9600 Pro. Despite the fact that the packaging recommends using this fan with ATI Radeon 9600 Pro cards, the mounting holes just don’t line up. Long story short, the fan is just too big to fit in the space allotted on the Powercolor 9600 Pro.
Not one to give up, l went over to one of my colleague’s computer and “borrowed” his ATI Radeon 9800 Pro (that’s going to be our little secret). On a true ATI Radeon, the fan is a lot larger and the mounting holes lined up beautifully with room to spare. Of course, the memory chipset heatsinks mounted without any problems at all though. Just use the thermal tape to hold them in place.
So, one hurdle out of the way, the big question is: “How does it perform?” Well, the numbers speak for themselves. We decided to run Q3 benchmark constantly for 30 minutes on both the stock and modified card. Stock temperatures were 33.7 idle and 39.6 load. Once we mounted the Coolforce we were running 30.7 idle and 35.1 under load. Impressive. Add to that the fact that you have red and yellow leds lighting up the unit and the fact that it is a quiet 23dBA and you end up with a nice, quiet cooling solution.
So, what do we think of the Coolforce from Spirecoolers? Well, that depends on what kind of video card you use. If you have a true ATI Radeon then this cooling kit will both add some flash to your case as well as keep your temperatures down. Of course, if you happen to own something like the Powercolor version of the ATI Radeon, well….it comes with some really nice memory chipset heatsinks but forget about mounting the fan. Actually, that’s not exactly true. You could always go out and buy some adhesive thermal paste or use Thermal tape but don’t plan on using the push-pins. So, don’t be fooled; when Spirecoolers says “Recommended for” they truly mean those EXACT products. If you have an alternative version, all bets are off.
Update:
When we reviewed the Coolforce GPU cooler at HardwareHounds a while ago we stated that it would not fit the Powercolor 9600 Pro. This turned out to be misleading. Upon further examination we discovered that we should change this statement to read: “…does not fit the Powercolor 9600 Pro 256 meg edition” For whatever reason, the 256 meg edition uses a much smaller fan due to the fact that there is much less free space on the card itself. The CoolForce fits the 128 meg edition perfectly. With this in mind, we at HardwareHounds wish to apologize to Spire coolers and to our readers for our generalization and change our score of the CoolForce from an undeserved 7 to a much more deserving 9.
Pros:
• Full copper
• Lots of accessories
• Only one wire to attach
• Leds are a really nice touch
• Dropped our temperatures by average of 4.5 degrees
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