Akasa Vortexx Neo

Verdict:

[+] NEO

Very easy to install; effective; quiet; directly exhausts heat

[-] SMITH

Zalman VF1000-LED is slightly better at cooling

It's fair to say that reference coolers for graphics cards cut corners in order to keep the overall cost of the card as low as possible. The use of mediocre thermal paste, cheap fans, and non-copper heatsinks and contact plates, plus the lack of heatpipes, are all common occurences.

With the Vortexx Neo, Akasa has stuck reasonably close to a traditional GPU cooler design but has made the bold step of carrying out the job properly.

The Vortexx Neo has a copper contact plate for the GPU and aluminium contact plates for the DRAM chips. Two heatpipes transfer this heat to a reasonably large aluminium heatsink, over which the quiet 80mm fan blows air. The UV-reactive plastic ducting means that the fan sucks in air across the card's VRMs and exhausts the hot air directly out of the rear of the case. Bear in mind that the Vortexx Neo will make your card two slots wide.

INSTALLATION

The Vortexx Neo installs easily - it resembles the reference cooler that you've carefully jimmied off your card, and is held in place by four screws. The fan uses a 3-pin header, so you'll have to route this to your motherboard and will therefore lose GPU temperature-based fan control.

UPDATE

Since we first printed this review in Issue 59, it has come to our attention that the Vortexx Neo is not compatible with G80-based graphics cards. Our apologies for any confusion. We have also just received confirmation from Akasa that the Vortexx Neo is compatible with ATI Radeon HD 4850 and HD 4870 cards, as well a GeForce 9800 GTX+ cards.

Click here to see the new list of the cards that the Vortexx Neo is compatible with (opens in new window)

COOLING

The Vortexx Neo is vastly superior to the reference cooler of our Asus EN8800GT TOP (a heavily overclocked GeForce 8800 GT). With the GPU fully stressed with 3DMark06, we measured a drop of 31°C with the Neo fitted, 2°C hotter than with the Zalman VF1000-LED. There were also no memory overheating problems when testing with Crysis.

CONCLUSION

The Vortexx Neo might not be quite as good at cooling a GPU as the Zalman VF1000-LED, but it isn't far off and offers other benefits. Direct exhausting of GPU heat is very welcome, and anyone with a side window in their case and a UV light will be rewarded. The Zalman cooler also costs £10 more than this cooler, making the Vortexx Neo an excellent purchase for people who have cards with reference coolers.

You can buy the Akasa Vortexx Neo from Scan Computers for £19.96 (price correct at time of review)

For more information on the Vortexx Neo, please visit Akasa's website

Akasa Akasa Vortexx Neo VGA Cooler

Akasa Vortexx Neo VGA Cooler

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