Mini Review: Thermalright V2 VGA Cooler (on a HD4850!)

After butchering the heat sink on my poor old HD4850 with an angle grinder (long story...), i needed a new, cheap and effective way of cooling this card. After browsing through the usual online stores, i stumbles across the Thermalright V2 copper heat sink at PCCG for $27. Considering most (ie more recent) coolers were around the $60 mark, i thought it looked like a great little buy. I didn't need maximum performance, just something to replace the already lacking stock cooler.

Here's a shot of the typical Thermalright packaging. Plain old cardboard. Just the way i like it, no rice, just performance!


Here's the bundle of goodies hidden away inside. We have the heat sink, instructions, ram sinks (hah, if you can call them that!), thermal paste, mounting hardware and of course, the trademark crappy Thermalright sticker!


Here's a closer look at the heat sink. Pretty standard all copper design with 4 heatpipes. Nothing new here, it just looks like a low profile version of the old XP-90C.


A shot of the base. A little bit grubby, doesn't bother me all that much. All the people that require A++ mirror finishes from the factory will not be impressed though.


Ahh the 'ram sinks'...... Just look at the size of this thing. IT'S ONLY JUST BIGGER THAN A BLOODY FAN CONNECTOR. I think it might hinder performance if anything, but it was free... so it goes on!


Here's a shot with the ram sinks installed. You might notice there's two which are almost flat. This is because the heatpipes won't fit over the standard sized sinks. Again, it probably just heats the ram more. You might want to consider some kind of mosfet cooling at this point. You can see my heatsink which i used earlier with my watercooling.


The heatsink is mounted with 4 thumb screws on the back. Installation was very quick and easy. No crushed cores today *remembers mounting volcano 7's on 9700 cards*


Here's a shot of it installed. One positive of this heat sink is it's fairly low profile. There's plenty of room if you're running a crossfire/sli setup.


Now with a 80mm fan installed. This little Spire fan has been going strong for years!


Now to performance... I wasn't sure what to expect here as I'm very unfamiliar with any gpu heat sinks made in the last few years. I bought this on clearance so i wasn't going to rule out average/poor performance with such a new and toasty card.

The results? Great! Idle temps were down to 31 degrees where the stock hsf would hover around in the 60s. Under full load, temps only reached an amazing 44 degrees! This was an amazing 36 degrees lower under load than the stock heatsink! For $27 i was absolutely over the moon with the performance, not to mention almost dead silent operation.

So... the overclocking! I managed to reach 700mhz on the core with this cooler. That's a 33mhz improvement over the stock cooling. After overclocking max temps only reached 47 degrees under load. Again, i was very impressed with this result. I feel that the overclock was purely voltage limited after seeing how well it flew with extra volts under water. I'm not going to over volt it under air atm because this card is soon to be retired and hopefully going to a new loving home where the owner will overclock the s*** out of it!