Hardware Review
Coolermaster CoolViva Pro SE
If you're finding the stock cooler on your video card not performing as good as when it was purchased, maybe a replacement is in order. Many users sometimes find themselves over clocking their video cards to increase video performance. Over clocking requires a good performing cooler in order for the GPU to run and cooled properly. Tonight we'll take a look at Coolermaster's CoolViva Pro SE VGA cooler. We would like to thank the Coolermaster team for making this review possible.
Coolermaster has always been on the forefront of thermal solutions. With their products now ranging from CPU coolers, VGA coolers and PC cases, Coolermaster has now become synonymous to PC modders worldwide. Let's now take a look at their new VGA cooler offering the CoolViva Pro SE.
The CoolViva Pro SE is an air cooled based VGA cooler, constructed with aluminum and copper based heat pipes. Here is a more detailed specification for the CoolViva Pro SE.
| Heat Sink Material | Copper base with 3 heatpipes |
| Heat Sink Dimensions | 145 x 112 x 38 mm |
| Weight | 290 g |
| Dimension | 13 x 12 x 8.88 mm |
| Fan Dimension (W / H / D) | 75 x 75 x 24 mm |
| Bearing Type | Long life sleeve |
| Fan Speed | 1800 R.P.M. |
| Fan Noise Level (dB-A) | 19 dBA |
| Voltage | 12 V |
| Material | Aluminum |
Running at a bout 1800 R.P.M and with a fan noise rating of 19dBA, this cooler should be really silent. The CoolViVa Pro Se comes in Coolermaster blister packaging complete with accessories and manual. We used an ATI X800PRO PCI-E to install the cooler on for this review. Installation was very simple and the information on the manual is very straightforward. One thing we liked about the cooler was the black plastic see through fan housing. Below is the test system we used the VGA cooler on. For testing we took temperature readings for our X800 PRO with the stock cooler and compare it to the CoolViVa Pro's GPU temperature reading. We also over clocked the GPU to see how well it cooled down our GPU under an over clocked setting.
| AMD 64 3700+ |
| ASUS A8N SLI |
| Crucial Ballistix Tracers 4x512 MB DDR 400 |
| 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 CoolViva Pro SE 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 X800 Pro's stock cooler.
As you can see from the charts above, the CoolViVa Pro cooled our x800 PRO very well. With the GPU 5 degrees cooler compared to the stock cooler, we can't help but feel satisfied with the testing. The CoolViVa cooled down our X800 PRO very well even when the card was over clocked. The video card was very stable throughout our over clock testing and this was thanks to the CoolViVa PRO SE. It was also extremely quiet throughout our testing. We were able to attain a very fast 535MHz with the core and 522 MHz on the memory speed.
Keeping a well cooled GPU will pro-long the life of your GPU and at the same time it will enable you do stable over clocking with your video card. The CoolViva works with a variety of NVIDIA and ATI video cards. Please refer to Coolermaster's web site for more details. With the good cooling performance of the CoolViVa Pro SE, we are glad to give it a score of 9 out of 10 and our UniqueRigs' Recommendation.
Pros:
Easy installation
Very low acoustics
Excellent performance
Can be used in both ATI and Nvidia cards
Very good adhesive on the memory heatsinks
Cons:
Exhaust not exntended utpo the edge of the slot, to channel the hot air directly out.
Manufacturer Link:
