CoolIT Cooling Accessories Roundup

If you have been with us for any amount of time, you’ll know that one of our favorite cooling companies is CoolIT. With their peltier chilled coolers, the Freezone and Eliminator, CoolIT has planted their flag among the elite cooling companies around today.

In fact, we liked those two products well enough to give them both 9 out of 10, the Eliminator for its performance at a reasonable price and the Freezone, while costing almost twice as much as its little brother, because it was, and still is, the best performing cooler we have tested to date. Add on the ease of installation and it’s easy to see why we love them so much.

In the run up to CES, CoolIT announced many different partnerships with OEM system builders with the most notable being Dell (the Dell announcement was actually released during CES.) Just last week, CoolIT announced perhaps their most impressive partnership, signing up to provide single slot cooling solutions for ATI’s x2900 XTs.

CoolIT has once again impressed us with their commitment to taking existing technology and making it better. In the case of ATI, they have taken the large stock cooler and manufactured their own block, allowing the card to take up only one slot instead of the two it takes up with the regular cooler installed.

It’s with announcements and partnerships like these that CoolIT has transformed itself into a heavy hitting cooler manufacturer, but many people don’t realize that they produce smaller hardware that not only add superior cooling compared to stock solutions, but also add to the overall look of the host PC. We are of course talking about their PCI booster fan and RAM fan. Both are easy to install and provide direct airflow over the PCI cards and system memory as well as bathe the interior of the case in blue lighting thanks to their blue LED fans.

Their most notable accessory isn’t even designed to keep anything cool in your PC, but rather to keep your beverage cool. Powered over USB, the beverage chiller is a novel little piece of hardware that is sure to turn a few heads when hooked up.

Over the next few paragraphs, we are going to take closer looks at all three of these units and see just how useful they are.

Starting with the newest addition to the CoolIT accessory lineup, the PCI mounted cooler is a simple device. Made entirely out of aluminum, with the CoolIT logo acting as a small fan guard, the PCI cooler isn’t supposed to be installed in a single PCI slot like most other coolers with a similar name. No, the fan is meant to sit on the outside of the PCI cards and the blue LED 80mm blows cooler air across whatever is installed in the slots. This includes video cards, PhysX cards, audio cards… anything that uses an AGP, PCI or PCI-E slot.

Receiving power via a 3-pin connector, the PCI cooler can install directly into a fan header on your motherboard or into a 4-pin Molex connector on your power supply with the help of an adapter. The fan itself is made out of clear plastic and the LED are in the fan itself, not around the outside of the fan.

To install the fan, simply remove the PCI slot screws at the top and the bottom of the slots. The ideal method of installation is to use the large thumb screws provided with the cooler and then screw the entire unit into those 2 thumb screws using the provided second set of screws.

You will need to be careful when tightening these screws down. They are made out of aluminum and I actually broke off the threads because I was apparently applying excessive amounts of torque. As seen in the previous picture, I was able to work around this minor mishap by using a pair of motherboard screws I had laying around. Below is the thumb screw with the threads knocked off. Perhaps CoolIT should use steel screws?

We first saw the RAM fan at CES, the same place we were shown the PCI booster. The RAM fan was sub-sequentially given to us as a gift for stopping by the booth. If you thought the PCI cooler was easy to install, wait until you see how simple the RAM fan is.

Using aluminum again, CoolIT has made the RAM fan with ease and convenience in mind. Simply stretch the ends apart a bit, place it over the end of the DIMMs and release. The cooler itself clamps onto the memory and stays in place. Again using the CoolIT logo as a fan guard, the RAM fan looks very similar to its larger brother.

With its much smaller fan (still using blue LEDs), the RAM fan is intended to not only cool of your memory modules by moving air across them, but also keep the surrounding area of the motherboard cooler too. This is done by angling the cooler slightly. The fan can be installed facing either way on the RAM, but I choose to angle it into the interior of the case to help cool not only the memory, but also the capacitors by the CPU as well.

Let’s take a look at the ‘cool’ beverage cooler and end with our final thoughts.