The Cooler, a Photo Tour
We’ll start with the packaging as usual. In this case we’re able to see the cooler as the packaging is clear plastic.
The packaging is pretty minimal really, not much to the front side. You do get an excellent view of the cooler. It looks quite similar to previous S1 coolers.
The rear of the box has a lot more data. You can also see the MOSFET and RAM heatsinks. On the far right is a compatibility list, which we’ll take a closer look at:
Pretty much everything under a 200w TDP that uses eight or fewer RAM chips is listed. Be aware that the 8800 GTS 320MB and 640MB use ten RAM chips, you’ll need to buy two more ram heatsinks to mount this cooler to them. Absent are the 7700 and 7800 series AMD GPUs, as AMD had not released them when the packaging was printed. The 7700 series is supported in fanless mode, while the 7800 series requires a fan or very good case airflow.
With the cooler out of the box we see pretty much the same thing as we saw with it in the box.
From the rear we finally get to see something new, the heatpipes! Four 6mm pipes are used, they’re soldered to the copper base and aluminum upper bracket, that bracket then screws to the two steel side brackets, those have two mounting orientations to fit different cards better.
You get a fair amount of stuff in the box, there is a rear IO plate with lots of vents, four MOSFET heatsinks, eight RAM heatsinks, a bag with crews, washers, and two thicknesses of spacers. Also included is a mixing spatula and some Arctic G1 heatsink mounting glop. The glop is a two part operation much like epoxy, though a lot easier to remove in theory. More on that in the mounting section, which happens to be next.
