The Gigabyte VPower

The VPower is made up of two very distinct colours, black and red. The shell, or shroud of the cooler is made up of a translucent red plastic with a black grill surrounding the centralized 80mm fan.

Click to enlarge

The blades themselves are black, but there is the usual splash of colour in its centre with the VPower logo.

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

Gigabyte's logo is somewhat less obvious, off to the side and situated on the black grill in silver text.

Click to enlarge

Looking at either end of the VPower, you're greeted with the site of a large, many finned heatsink. Made of aluminium it doesn't have the sophisticated curling or twisting that other heatsinks have. Instead Gigabyte have simply made gulleys of sorts, through the heatsink, creating a reasonably large surface area within it. This forces the air to flow in a single direction meaning it can be guided over as much of the surface as possible. This usually isn't as effective as some heatsink's which have convulated fin setups to maximise surface area.

Click to enlarge

Flipping the VPower over, it's sensitive belly is exposed. Under hear you have the core, several heatpipes and the mounting screw holes.

Click to enlarge

There are 4 heatpipes in total, all of aluminium construction. Heatpipes are used to transfer heat quickly from an area of high temperature to an area of low temperature. To read more about heatpipes, check out our glossary entry here.

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

These heatpipes run from the core to the aluminium fins along the edges. The core itself is covered in the large red sticker we saw earlier, which requires removal before mounting.

Underneath, there is a solid copper base which doesn't have a particularly polished surface. However, as we saw with Gigabyte's Cyclops cooler, a polished base isn't necessary for quality cooling. It's also usually only done for show and doesn't always make much difference to the cooling of the product.

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge