14 DAY TRIAL // Most graphics cards are coming nowadays with active cooling solutions that are cleverly designed and offer a wide range of features that will help them do their job better: keep your hot graphics processing unit cool. While there will always be cards equipped with passive cooling systems that rely solely on their heat dissipation surface to do the job, the hot parts of these cards, mainly the graphics processing units and the video memories, are running at lower clock speeds than the ones that are encountered on their counterparts cooled by active solutions.
As most graphics cards manufacturing companies are fitting the passively cooled cards with the same GPUs that are found on the actively cooled products and then they lower the clock speeds, there is a huge overclocking potential in those cards, if only somebody decided to come up with a decent cooling solution. And this is how the market for separate cooling solutions aimed at graphics cards was born.
One new player on the market is the Akasa company, which announced the launch of a VGA cooler named Votexx. This graphics card cooling system is designed by Akasa's Hong Kong team and according to the news site tcmagazine[http://www.tcmagazine.com/comments.php?shownews=16015] it is compatible with cards produced by AMD/ATI and Nvidia. It is also said to offer increased cooling performance over most stock cooling solutions while keeping the operating noise at a very low level.
Looking at the Votexx cooler we can see that the heat pipe trend is in full swing here too, as it comes with two such heat pipes made of copper that connect a 60mm square base (made of copper too) to a heatsink made of several fins. A specially designed low noise fan is also present and it is placed on the side of the heatsink in order to cool both the graphics processing engine and the nearby components like the voltage regulators and memory modules. Working at a steady 2300rpm, the cooling fan delivers a performance of 0.40?C/W and Akasa claims that similar results are achieved only by stock active cooling solutions that run at much greater speeds and which are usually very noisy.
In order to be compatible with the board design of more graphics cards, the Votexx comes with a tool-free installation kit and a standard 3-pin motherboard power connector. This cooler should be compatible with most graphics cards built around AMD's X1800, 1900, 1950 GPUs and Nvidia's 6800, 7800 and 7900GTX video chips.