A whole 5 more

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Like the GX810 before it, the 815 comes in a nice shiny cardboard box with an easily opened clamshell plastic packet inside.

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In this clamshell you’ll find the mounting screws – SLI/Crossfire versions and standard – the manual, eight self-adhesive RAM heatsinks, a small tube of heatpaste and the cooler itself.

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The cooler itself is circular with 140 copper fins slapped onto a circular heatpipe. The heatpipe connects to the interface pad twice; from both ends. The middle radial fan blows air through the fins and creates turbulence to move the heat from the fins to the air. On the GX810 this resulted in near silent operation and admirable cooling. The GX815 goes one better as the fan that is used is more powerful, which means louder, but can go at the same speed as the one used on the GX810. This means that it should idle at the same temperature, but will be able to crank up the revs should the temperature rise too high. Toted as the ‘Gamer edition’ you can see why the extra RPM is needed.

To make sure that the fan isn’t constantly at the max RPM of 3000 spitting out 33.81dBA, there is a built-in thermistor which measures the temperature and chooses a fan speed to match. The fan can go as low as 1200RPM @ 18.50dBA. At full pelt, the fan moves a rather small 11.10CFM, however the blade design doesn’t require a hurricane force fan.

Connecting this fan to power is by a 3 pin motherboard header style plug. You’ll have to make sure you have either an adapter for molex, or a free slot on your motherboard. This plug won’t fit into the sockets that the stock cooler on your graphics card will have, plus this fan could pull more power than your graphics card header can provide and cause all sorts of problems.

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The fan blades are clear, rather than the orange colour used on the GX810. Fortunately, that and the fan speed is the only major difference between this and the other GX coolers, and ZEROtherm have wisely kept the interface pad nice and shiny, and as you can see, mirrored.

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Single card - Click to enlarge

The cooler itself isn’t very tall, which means that it can be used in multi-GPU environment, which is further evident by the two separate types of screws packaged with the GX815. The standard screws are larger, and allow you to use just your fingers to tighten them, while the multi-GPU type are much smaller and you’ll have to hunt for the screwdriver.

This cooler is compatible with quite a large range of cards thanks to the bracket that is fixed on the cooler; you’ll be able to use it on the following cards:

nVidia	ATI
GeForce 6800 series	Radeon X1300 series
GeForce 7600 series	Radeon X1600 series
GeForce 7800 series	Radeon X1800 series
GeForce 7900 series	Radeon X1900 series
NOT GEFORCE 6600/7800 AGP	NOT RADEON 9550/9600 SERIES

The nVidia 8 series of cards is missed off this list as this product came out before they were released, and if the mounting bracket was made any bigger for the 8 series mounting holes, it would cause compatibility problems with other cards. Radeon HD cards are also not on the list because they, again, came out after this cooler, plus they produce a LOT more heat than previous generations and this cooler isn’t designed for such situations.