Date: April 26, 2007 - Author: Greg King
As their name suggests, Cooler Master is no stranger to cooling products. They were however new to graphics card cooling, but no longer thanks to their CoolViva Pro. We are taking their first GPU cooler for a spin to see if their legendary quality is carried over here.
Ahh yes, another cooler review. If there is one piece of hardware that can not only add flare to a case, but also functionality, it’s the lowly cooler. Whether you’re trying to get a few extra MHz out of your hardware or simply wanting to make your whole PC quieter, your best bet is with an after market cooler.
When it comes to CPUs, there are more companies that you can imagine and they are all trying to sell you the same basic thing. As it turns out, many coolers are based on the same design but there are also a handful of manufacturers who push the envelope and set out to change the way we cool our PCs.
In the realm of after market video card coolers, the selection is significantly smaller. With only a handful of players, companies are starting to realize this and make GPU coolers of their own. One such company is Cooler Master. Long known for their PC chassis, particularly their Stacker line of cases, Cooler master has decided to throw their name into the growing hat of companies making video card coolers.
With their Cool Viva Pro (interesting name to say the least), they hope to use their well deserved reputation for momentum as they enter the GPU cooler arena.
Cooler Master has chosen to package the Viva Pro in a simple clam shell plastic case. Through the front of the package, we can see the cooler itself. Aside from the cooler, the only other information offered is that the cooler fits not only ATI cards, but NVIDIA cards as well. From the looks of things, the Viva Pro will act as most high stock video cards and pull air from inside the case, blow it across the heatsink that sits on top of the GPU and expel it out the back of the case.
Included with the Viva Pro is a small bag of accessories. These include the necessary adapters to mount the cooler on most GPUs. Sadly the recently released 8800 series from NVIDIA cannot be cooled with the Viva Pro. However, this can hardly be held against Cooler Master as the cooler was out before the launch of that series. If they approach the coolers as they do cases, they no doubt are working on a model that is compatible with the latest and greatest video cards from NVIDIA and ATI (when the R600) is launched.
As we can see, included in the kit is a pair of slotted PCI brackets to allow warm air to be expelled out of the back of your case, some Cooler Master thermal paste, a set of adapters, a four pin Molex to GPU fan adapter, 8 ram sinks, four posts needed to mount the cooler onto the video card and interestingly enough, a foam shield to be used on video cards without such a shield.
Also included is a small, multi-language installation manual folded up nice and neat, road map style.
Once out, we see the Viva Pro in all its glory. With a large plastic housing, the cooler certainly takes up a lot of room. Not exactly sure what font they used but the logo sure is large and bright. Also noticeable is the exceptionally large heatsink housed underneath the transparent black plastic. Made of aluminum with three copper plated heat pipes running the length of the heatsink, it will be interesting to see how this thing performs.
Taking a closer look at the fan, following in the path of other popular coolers, Cooler Master has decided to use the squirrel cage style of fan to move air across the fins of the heatsink. With the immense size of the Viva Pro, the fan will stick out far enough to not only pull air in from the top but also on the bottom of the fan housing as well.
As mentioned earlier, Cooler Master has given the Viva Pro three heat pipes to dispense the heat evenly across the length of the heat sink. These can easily be seen when the cooler is looked at from the side.
At the end of the cooler, we can see all of the fins, lined up in a row.
On the bottom of the Viva Pro is the copper plate that will actually make contact with the GPU itself. This is shipped with a plastic sticker on the bottom (most manufacturers practice this method as well) to keep the block free of any unwanted scratches that could possible find their way onto the block during shipping and/or packaging.
Once the protective sticker is removed, a small fan screw is placed on the block itself to show off the finish on the surface of the copper plate. While not near as perfect as one would like, the finish isn’t bad and when used with a decent thermal paste, this shouldn’t be a problem at all.
Overall the Viva Pro has a solid design, but how effective it is will be seen on our next page.
The test card what will be used in this review is an eVGA 7800 GTX. The 7800 series of cards can run hot and should provide a suitable card to test the capabilities of the Cool Viva Pro.
First up, we need to identify the correct holes to screw the posts into. These will be the posts that run through the mounting holes on the PCB of the video card and must be placed in the correct holes. To aid in the installation, Cooler Master provides a thorough manual. For those of you reading this review looking for the proper holes to use, you’re in luck. Borrowed directly from the Viva Pro .pdf, here are the hole assignments.
As mentioned earlier in the review the card that we are using to test out the Viva Pro is the 7800 GTX.
Included with the Viva Pro is a small square foam spacer. This is to protect the chip itself should the cooler shift and move. Chips can be very brittle and this spacer will aid in protecting the chip if there is not one around the GPU already. In the case of this card, there is already a spacer surrounding the chip so the included foam spacer is not needed.
Once we figure out which hole we need to place the posts in, we screw them in and prepare to place the cooler on the video card.
When the posts are placed through the mounting holes, we place the four metal caps on the end and tighten them down. In our case, we were able to tighten them down all the way to the end of the threads on the posts. Others might be different so please be careful when installing the Viva Pro on your card.
When the cooler is secured onto the card, the final thing to do is place the provided ramsink on the memory and plug in the fan. Some cards use a 3 pin plug and others use a 4. To accommodate this difference, Cooler Master has placed one of each plug on the power cable to the fan.
Once installed, we can see in the next photo how it looks the 7800 GTX. As the picture shows, the cooler is rather large but is actually shorter than the Zalman 9700 heatpipe cooler that can be seen in the back ground. When installed, there shouldn’t be any issues with clearing the door on any case that can accommodate a large CPU cooler like the Zalman.
When viewed from the top, we see that the Viva Pro is wide as well. This can almost be considered a three slot cooler since it takes up that much space.
To test the Cool Viva Pro, we will record both the temperatures when idle and when under extreme load. Recording the idle temps is simple. To record the load temps, the thermal monitor in the NVIDIA drivers is loaded up and we will let it record the temps as an hour of Command and Conquer III is played. I know it’s a rough job but someone has to test this stuff.
We will also find the maximum overclock that we could achieve with both the stock cooler installed, as well as the Viva Pro.
There you can see the performance differences between the stock cooler and the Cooler Master Viva Pro. In our tests, the only thing that we found the cooler to do really well is operate in complete silence. Granted the temperatures of the GPU were cooler with the Viva Pro but they weren’t exactly what we were expecting. However, with the Cooler Master on the 7800, we were able to get a 15 MHz higher overclock than we were with the stock cooler. For those of you that overclock your CPU, this might not seem like a lot but with video cards, it makes a considerable difference.
Installation of the card was simple and honestly only took about 20 minutes, of that 20, approximately 10 of that was removing the stock heatsink from the video card. Once installed, we saw just how big the thing is. Dwarfing the card it was installed on the looks of the cooler never caught on around the office. Perhaps it’s just the way it looks on a green PCB but I honestly find the Viva Pro to be ugly. It means well, and performs better than a stock cooler, but it really doesn’t bring anything to the table in the looks department. This is surprising considering the stellar cases and HDD enclosures that Cooler Master manufactures.
At the end of the day, the Cooler Master Cool Viva Pro does what it says it does. It operates quietly and does perform better than a stock cooler. With that said though, anyone who is vain enough to care about how things look, which is approximately 95% of all gamers, this might be a card you want to skip on. If you disagree with me, please let me know if the forums but I honestly don’t think that it brings anything to the table in the looks department. Taking all of this into consideration, the Cooler Master Cool Viva Pro gets a 6 out of 10.
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