Verdict: Although the Revoltec's mounting let it down with our test card, otherwise, it's an excellent cooler. It's the cheapest VGA HSF we've seen, but it outperforms the Arctic Cooling Accelero and isn't completely trounced by the Zalman.
The Revoltec uses an 80mm fan with a similar blade pitch to the Zalman VF900-Cu, which results in similarly quiet operation. Unlike the Zalman, it lacks a fan controller, and the 2,000rpm fan is audible.
As you'd expect for its price, the Revoltec isn't an all-copper product, as it has aluminium fins. The Revoltec's radiator is also larger than that of the Zalman, and it uses four heatpipes instead of two. The Revoltec's GPU block is also bigger, although it's nowhere near as well finished.
Mounting the Revoltec was far more troublesome than it was with the Zalman though. The mounting plate is full of holes, which supposedly allow you to fit it to any Nvidia card from the GeForce 4 onwards, and any ATi Radeon from the 9000-series onwards. Unfortunately, when we tried to fit it to a Radeon X1900XTX, the suggested mounting points were way off, so we were forced to attach the Revoltec using just two bolts. This was secure, but without sufficient pressure, a heatsink's efficiency suffers.
That said, temperature results during testing weren't too bad. With the Revoltec, the idle temperature of our Radeon X1900XTX was 48ûC, and the maximum temperature under load was 66ûC, which compares well to the 76ûC when under load with the Accelero X2.
