14 DAY TRIAL // More than a month has passed since Nvidia made official its GeForce GTX 580 graphics card and, until recently, custom designs have been slow to make their appearance, Inno3D being among the few manufacturers that are set to release an in-house designed GTX 580, if all goes well for their iChill VC26 cooler.
The slow appearance of GF110 custom designs is mostly due to Nvidia, as the company, in an attempt to protect its GeForce brand, has imposed more rigorous rules to its partners when it comes to the cooling solutions used in their boardS.
As a result, manufacturers have to undergo a series of acoustic and thermal tests meant to prove their cooler is at least as effective as Nvidia's reference design.
The result is the iChill VC26 cooler, that is going to be used for all GF110 based graphics cards (GTX 580 and GTX 570), built by Inno3D, the solution employed featuring a copper base, five copper heatpipes, and 112 aluminum cooling fins.
Three orange fans will be placed on top of the huge heatsink, two of these coming in as 80mm in diameter while the third (the middle one) will be a tad bigger, measuring 90mm.
All three will be PWM controlled, meaning their rotation speed varies depending on the load and the GPU's temperature.
In addition, an aluminum heatspreader will be covering the memory chips and the VRM circuitry in order to reduce the operating temperature of these chips.
According to Guru3D, the iChill VC26 cooler should drop the full-load temperature of the GTX 580/570 by a large margin, compared to Nvidia's reference design, without affecting the acoustic performances of the card.
A release date is not yet available, but this is Inno3D's second custom cooled GTX 580 design to be showcased, after the water-cooled iChill Back Series GeForce GTX 580 that made its appearance a while back.
