Hardware Review
Spire CoolForce IV
Stock cooling is usually enough for any video cards to cool down the GPU at stock speeds. With overclocking, that's another story. A stock cooler can't really be compared to a premium GPU cooling solution. Tonight we'll take a look at Spire's CoolForce IV (SP208). We would like to thank the Spire team for making this review possible.
Let's take a look at Spire's fourth version of their GPU cooler. The package comes in a Black/Red Spire package. Inside are the GPU cooler, manual, thermal grease and an assortment of installation accessories. The heat sink is made up of copper for effective heat transfer. The heat then is dissipated by a 12DCV Brower Black fan. A rubbery pad is also used as heat contacts for the GPU memory. Here are some more specs for the CoolForce IV:
| Dimensions | 12386MM |
| Fan Dimensions | 83x83x30MM |
| Fan Type | 12 DCV Brower Black fan |
| Bearing | Two Ball Bearing |
| Fan Speed | 2000 RPM |
| Noise Level | 19 dBA |
| Air Flow | 28.0 CFM 2000 RPM +/-10% |
| Rated Speed | 2000 RPM +/-10% |
| Life Hours | 70,000> |
| Connector Type | 3 pin, Video card |
| Wire Length | 200mm |
| Grease type | Stars-420-Tube included |
| Cooler weight | 90.0G |
We'll be installing our CoolForce IV on a ATI 9800 Pro. Since we'll be only looking at the CoolForce IV's cooling performance, we decided to go old school and decided a standard AGP system should suffice for testing. We'll be comparing cooling performance between the stock 9800 Pro cooler and the CoolForce IV. We will also see the overclocking capability of the CoolForce IV and see how well it holds up. Before we installed the CoolForce IV, we first took temperature readings from the 9800 Pro's stock cooler.
Installation of the CoolForce IV was very intuitive and straightforward once you've seen all the parts included together with the package. We first took out the stock cooler. We removed the left over thermal paste on the GPU and applied the supplied thermal grease. After mounting the back support bracket and screws for the cooler, we were now ready to re-install the AGP video card. Listed below are the specs for our test system:
| GA-K8NSC-939 |
| AMD 64 3000+ |
| Mushkin 2x512 MB HP 3200 |
| 2 x 80 GB Western Digital SATA |
| 16 LG DVD-RW |
| Silverstone ST56F 560W PSU |
Click the image to see it full view...
We ran 3DMark several times just to get the GPU heated and see if it was stable. The ambient noise coming from the CoolForce IV was very low and silent. After thirty minutes, the system was pretty stable and there were no crashes. We then proceeded to take thermal readings with an external thermal probe. As expected, the temperature was considerably lower compared to the ATI 9800 Pro's stock cooler.
The ATI 9800 Pro's default core and memory speeds are 380MHz and 340MHz (680MHz) respectively. We were able to attain a very stable 440 MHz core speed and the memory was able to reach 370MHz (740MHz DDR). The temperature as expected went up once we overclocked the GPU. However, the rise in temperature was very marginal.
Overall, we were very satisfied with the cooling of the CoolForce IV. Not only it cooled down the video card while at stock speeds, it also kept it at very acceptable temperatures while it was overclocked. It was also very silent during the whole time we tested. In conclusion, we give the CoolForce IV a score of 8 out of 10 with Unique Rigs recoommendation.
Pros:
Easy installation
Silent fan
Very good cooling performance
Can be used in both ATI and Nvidia cards
Cons:
A list of compatible cards printed on manual and package
Only one side of the memory chips are cooled
Manufacturer Link:
