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MACS MA-8200 TEC VGA cooler - Retail Peltier cooling on a VGA card.
A little while ago a marketing contact of Guru3D was trying to convince me that TEC cooling, or what we all know as Peltier cooling is a very good way to cool down hardware these days. Now .. we've known peltier cooling for a long long time now, the principles we'll discuss on the next page; yet I have never been a big fan of Peltier cooling for several reason. The first being heat .. you add heat to cool down a product. That heat is disposed in your system ... the second factor is that since you add heat (we'll explain do not worry) e need to input additional wattage .. and this power consumption increases. Another factor is that if you misuse Peltier cooling .. you can honestly overcool your product below zero and effectively get condensation on your product .. yikes .. so never go below 10 degrees C.
Peltier cooling has however a very big advantage .. you can set it a certain wattage and then it will simply cool down your product to let's say 20 degrees C and should remain pretty level at that temperature.
You still with me ? So after thinking about it a little I decided to give TEC cooling a chance as hey .. three years ago I had the same disliking of water-cooling, and today all PC's in the Guru3D.com lab are water-cooled. So why wouldn't the same thing fly for peltier cooling.
What we'll do today is simple .. we'll strip down an expensive high-end GeForce 7900 GTX 512MB, smack a peltier cooler on it and then see how well it functions. The product comes from MACS and is the MA-8200 TEC VGA cooler. This product should bring down the temperature of a GPU to very acceptable levels thanks to a mixture of several innovations. Obviously first is the usage of the di-electric plate (peltier cooer) then the combo with a dual-slot heatpipe and last but not least an active two-fan cooling mechanism.
Enough said .. let's go to the next page where we'll discuss cooling methods, show you the product and installation, followed by a small test and obviously our verdict.
Next page please ..
