Final Thoughts
I’ll have to start out as the heavy here. I was actually expecting more from CoolIT System’s Dual Drive Bay VGA Cooler for nVidia 8800 series GPUs. After looking at what the features were touting, I was really looking forward to a reduction in noise. It’s actually really nice sometimes to have a high performance system that you don’t have to shout over. Instead I get new and different, louder, yet more annoying noises. It’s like I was shopping for a Civic and ended up with a top fuel funny car. I should have known better than to expect quiet from a company that clearly builds performance products.
Getting back on the lighter side, this system is clearly here to peform. With massive double digit decreases in temperatures for our super hot eVGA 8800 ULTRAS, this was clearly the highlight of the review. In fact, as a result of these temperature decreases, I was actually able to overclock my pair of ULTRAs up to the same speed as their highest end off the shelf overclocked brothers. I took the stock 612MHz GPU/2160 Mhz Memory to a 675MHz GPU/2250 Mhz Memory and ran that all day long without any weird artifacts and just a degree difference between the official numbers I logged.
Although I couldn’t get higher than 695 MHz GPU/2290 MHz Memory on my two cards, it doesn’t mean that you won’t be able to go higher. The Cosmos 1000 isn’t the coolest case in the world and not all ULTRAs are created equally. Some may overclock better than others.
Another thing that was touted as a great selling point of this product was its ease of installation. It definitely wasn’t a walk in the park and the experience that I had having to bend things and cut things to make everything fit would probably frustrate the hell out of a less experienced user. I would like to give CoolIT Systems the benefit of the doubt that my sample was one of the first ones out there and that they will work through these fitment issues. I for one didn’t mind taking some tin snips to my case and making that Dual Drive Bay fit though I would have liked to have seen the coolers themselves fit the cards properly out of the box without bending the crap out of the PCB.
Speaking of the drive bay, there was an interesting thing I discovered about where the exhausted hot air gets dumped. In our Cosmos 1000 enclosure, the Dual Drive Bay is mounted directly below the optical drive, and is directly in front of the CPU area. All of the hot air from the pump and radiator, you guessed it, gets shoveled into this area, which lead the CPU to increase in temperature by anywhere from five to ten degrees. Although I’m certain that CoolIT is pleased that this makes a great case to upgrade to one of their excellent CPU cooling systems, I’m sure this would be a bit of a surprise for anyone that wasn’t expecting that.
At the end of the day, the CoolIT Systems Dual Drive Bay Reference NV VGA Cooler deserves a pat on the back for performance. However, I find myself hard pressed to recommend it to anyone but experienced users who don’t mind a little modding and who don’t care if their system sounds like an aircraft. However, I do love performance and I’ve got watts to burn and a good set of headphones, but CoolIT really wasn’t too straight up with what this bad boy is really like.
Pros
- A Very High Peformance Cooling System for your 8800 series GPU
Cons
- This system is nowhere near quiet
- Very quirky to install and required some modding of our case
- Sucks up quite a bit of power. 850 Watt PSU minimum.
Overall Rating: 8.0 / 10.0
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