If you, like me have a graphics card that doesn't have a fan on it and is cooled by a large piece of metal then you may have noticed that some cards get a little toasty when being used. I decided to buy a PCI cooler exhaust fan to see what difference it made to the temperature of my graphics card. I took a couple of photos of the cooler so that you can see it's design and how it looks close up.
As you can see the blower is not massive. It is about 80mm and the output is the size of the rear expansion ports on the back of the computer case. I first took an idle reading of the temperature of the graphics card. I left the computer on for 30 minutes without anything running other than CPUID Hardware Monitor. It reached a maximum temperature of 49c. Which is quite high for idle. You can see the temperature reading in the bottom left of the temperatures.
I then installed the PCI blower fan in the slot directly below the graphics card with the blower fan almost touching the fins of the heatsink. As you can see in the following image.
I turned the computer on and put my hand behind the blower fan. To my supprise it was quite powerful and I could feel a fair ammount of air coming out which is definaltly a good sign. It also wasn't that loud and did not effect the overall volume of the PC. I then opened CPUID Hardware Monitor and check the temperatures. They had dropped by a full 10c which is very impressive.
As you can see a very good improvement for something so cheap and so available. You can also get more expensive models with even better CFM which would cool even more. Now as for the rumor that these things interrupt the cooling flow to the CPU. If you have a quick look at the before and after photos you will also notice a 1c drop in the temperature of the CPU as well. That could well just have happened by accident but I am not sure. The positive thing is that it didn't make the temperature of it higher so that have proved the theory wrong.
Overall I was very impressed with the way the blower fan worked and in my opinion it is a great design.
Thanks for reading, Jack-O-Bytes
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