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Today we review what we believe to be the best performing VGA cooler, as the new Thermaltake ISGC-V320 hits our test bed. This product is massive, spanning the length of a high-end GeForce GTX graphics card, which allows it to support a pair of 120mm fans. The huge design allows for not only low load temperatures, but also near silent operation... Recently Thermaltake launched a new product family called ISGC, which stands for “Inspiration of Silent Gaming Cooling”. As the name suggests, this new family consists of cooling products that are targeted at gamers, and not only that, they are also designed to be silent. Already the series consists of four CPU coolers suited for use with the latest AMD and Intel processors.  However, what makes the ISGC series so special is the unique fan technology, which features an indention edge on the blade tip. Thermaltake says that this fan blade shape not only looks impressive, but it also minimizes noise. Also helping to reduce the operating volume are vibration-absorbing soft mounts. Already we have had quite a bit of experience with these ISGC fans, and we quite like them, which is good news as today’s review sample features not one but rather two of them. It is worth noting that currently the ISGC fans only come in 80mm and 120mm sizes, which makes today’s review even more exciting, as we are looking at the first and only ISGC VGA cooler. The new Thermaltake ISGC-V320 is a beast and there is simply no other way to put it. Already you know what the “ISGC” part of the model name represents. The “V” means that this is a VGA product and the 320 means that it can also handle 320 watts of heat, which is amazing. This means that the ISGC-V320 is more than qualified to take on the GeForce GTX285 or Radeon HD4890, and thanks to the universal mounting design it can. There is however a few draw backs to such an extreme product that we will explore in this review, with none more obvious than its sheer size. Ultimately, if the ISGC-V320 has any hope at all of cooling the latest ATI and Nvidia graphics cards while generating almost no noise, it will have to feature a tremendous amount of surface area. Surface area does come at a cost, and while the ISGC-V320 has plenty of it, be prepared to sacrifice four expansion slots, including the one used by the graphics card. The other cost of course being to your wallet, though at this stage we are not entirely sure how much this new Thermaltake VGA cooler will retail for. Still, with the ISGC 120mm fan’s costing roughly $18 US each, there is no way it is going to be cheap. |
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