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Are aftermarket coolers worth it?

Kinda ironic that while the aftermarket coolers represent reasonably good value whilst cards are new and the cooler to card price ratio is good... you probably wouldn't want to risk your warranty removing the stock cooler whilst it's new. By the time the warranty has run out the price ratio between a 2 year old card (for example) and the cooler will be much worse and seemingly not as good to get.

That aside... normally aftermarket coolers are very very good.. but read some reviews and user experiences before settling on the cooler you want for your card.

Thing's to consider> They are often bigger, vent into the case, won't always allow fan control via software (some do.), generally run much much cooler than stock and tend to be much quieter than stock cooler's.

One thing to watch for is things like say with the Accelero Extreme where that had bad VRM cooling on the 4870X2 so it's worth reading model specific reviews. (and other's like the tape not being good enough and allowing the ram sinks to fall off when warm lol.

If you look at a review of the VF3000F for example... you will find it mentions the assembly does not need glue/adhesive on the ramsinks to attach them, which is excellent, as it would be easy to return to the stock cooler if need be. Where is falls down slightly is not being able to control the fan via software in windows (Maybe via motherboard software though, but not GPU software). But it's probably worth it to get awesome cooling, hardly any noise and just set and forget the fan speed you are happy with in advance.

Enough rambling.. ;-)
 
^^Actually some good points raised there Scougar. I found the Gelid icy Vision fans ran at full speed all the time and although not too noisy I wanted them quieter so I used a zalman fanmate I had lying around to control the fan speed. One benefit I wasn't expecting was that my cpu temps dropped 3-4c. The Gelid was fiddly to fit and took around 2hrs, I was being very careful though, but very worthwhile as I can easily clock this card to 850\1700\1674 @ 1.020v and it only gets up to 55c running Heaven 2.1.
Very impressed with the Gelid cooler.:D
 
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