Installation

Installation is very easy and doesn't even require reading the manual as the pictures are all laid out for each process wonderfully. First the original heatsink and fan are removed and the GPU is cleansed of its old thermal paste. The pink thermal pads for the VRAM are applied and the thermal paste that's included is evenly spread on the GPU. Four black bushings were installed on each mounting post and the Akasa Vortexx Neo cooler is placed on the graphics card. Turning the card over, a plastic washer is applied to each post and the fasteners are screwed down by hand. Using a standard flat-edge screwdriver, each fastener is tightened until the post sticks through the top of the fastener, no longer allowing it to be tightened any more. This is a very good mounting design which doesn't allow any user to overtighten the fasteners. The cooler was then removed to make sure there was good, even GPU-to-cooler contact and the contact is excellent, with most of the thermal paste being pushed to the edges. The 8800 GS that is used for this review is not on the compatibility chart for this cooler, however everything lined up with no problems, save one memory chip that is not fully covered. It covers enough of the chip and will not diminish the cooler's performance.


With the Akasa Vortexx Neo installed, it makes any single slot graphics card look much more intimidating and impressive. There is enough room to use two of these coolers on two graphics cards for SLI or CrossFire applications. The fan cable is able to be removed from the hold-downs on the fan for more length, or any number of the hold-downs on the cooler can be used to shorten the cable to give a nice clean look.


With the Akasa Vortexx Neo installed in a case, it prominently glows blue with the LED fan. With a UV reactive casing, adding any lights to a computer case will help the cooler glow even more.

Performance

During testing the ambient temperature was 23°C. As you may have noticed above a 8800 GS was used for this review. It is actually an XFX 8800 GS XXX Alpha Dog Edition.





The Akasa Vortexx Neo's performance overall is very good. For such a large fan spinning at 2500 RPM it is virtually silent, with the 1100 RPM fan that cooled the CPU in the test system easily being more audible. One would literally need to put their ear within an inch of the cooler to hear any wind or fan noise. With a 40°C idle temperature it's not the best performer but after 30 minutes of using Folding@Home GPU2 client under load, the temperature only rose 12°C! 53°C under load on air with a factory overclocked NVIDIA G92 core is no small feat!