Vvikoo 8800GT Continued

Cooler

As you may have picked up from the box art, the cooler on this bad boy is Zalman made and as the embossing on the top lets you know, the official name for it is VF1000.

The fan attached to the large heatsink has a centralized Vvikoo sticker which is the only mention of them on the cooler.

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The heatsink is full copper, and therefore all of the fins are copper too. Straight through the middle of said fins run the heatpipes, all four of them. Heatpipes are hollow tubes filled with either a highly conductive liquid or vapor and are an effective way of transferring heat from an area of high temperature to an area of low temperature. To read more about heatpipes, check out our glossary entry here.

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Click to enlarge

In comparison to the rather impressive looking GPU heatsink, the one covering the PWM area is pretty disappointing. It's at least black which means it sort of blends in with the components around it but it's size makes it hard to believe that it will be effective as a cooler. Time will tell.

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Along the back of the card and around the edge of the front is the RAM sink. It looks pretty slick with it's matt black finish. However, this is it for RAM cooling, just this black plate. I know I'm knit picking a little and am genuinely impressed with the whopping GPU heatsink on the front, but I was just expecting a little more from the card that had such a stellar looking main cooler.

At the base of the RAM sink is a small sticker covering up one of the screws holding on the front cooler. This stops you from changing the cooler (should you want/need to) without knowing that it will invalidate your warranty.

Shrugging off that warning, I dismantled the cooler:

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With the heatsink removed you get a much better view of certain aspects of it, such as the heatpipes. Also, you can see that there are 5 mounting points for each screw, meaning you could probably recycle this cooler onto several other cards too.

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The core of the VF1000 is relatively reflective, which is usually just done for show as apposed to improving temperatures, but it at least shows attention to detail.

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Click to enlarge