Zalman ZM80A-HP

This review (or should I say product) came very timely.
At the moment i’m trying to get rid of as much noise as possible from my computer. A quiet psu, a quiet cpu cooling, no case fans and so on. The only three things left in my computer which makes noise is the hard drive, the north bridge fan and the video card fan. The noise from the video card is now gone thanks to Zalman’s latest product.

This review (or should I say product) came very timely.
At the moment i’m trying to get rid of as much noise as possible from my computer. A quiet psu, a quiet cpu cooling, no case fans and so on. The only three things left in my computer which makes noise is the hard drive, the north bridge fan and the video card fan. The noise from the video card is now gone thanks to Zalman’s latest product.

The product they’ve sent us is a Zalman ZM80A-HP, a passive cooling solution for video cards. Thus without any moving parts we should be able to cool even the most modern card on the market, in my case a Radeon 9700 Pro from Gigabyte. Moreover Zalman promises as good, or even better, cooling than the existing solutions.

Sounds too good to be true? Read on…

Zalman ZM80A-HP
Material:	Aluminium
Weight:	400 grams
Total heat dissipation area:	1300 cm2
Heatpipe:	Gold plated copper
Accessories:	2 tubes with thermal paste, additional screws, a screwdriver and a manual
Estimated price:	~$33

Zalman’s package seems to be well thought through and the included manual makes it easy for anyone to install the cooling.
We are going to spare you from viewing how we applied the cooling since it comes with a good manual, instructions are available at Zalman’s homepage and many other reviews have looked like manuals themselves; no more of that from NH.
Instead we take a look at before and after pictures and we shall see how the whole thing worked out.

Before

The fan which was mounted at the card was quite noisy, we did not measure the decibel level of noise exactly but the noise was a high frequent whining noise which gets on your nerves pretty fast. On the front of the card we can see heatsinks on the memory chips, but unfortunalety Gigabyte has economized with heatsinks on the back side which gives an unwanted side effect which you can read about in the tests.

After

ZM80A-HP fits nicely with its same lovely color as the previous cooling. The combination with red and “gold” looks really nice. Even as we had approximately 1,5 cm high heatsinks they did not cause any problem during the installation.

Side view

When you look at the card from the side view you can see that it is very tall now, this unfortunaletly makes you loose one PCI spot which is next to the AGP slot.
We can also see that there is plenty of space for RAM heatsinks on the top side of the card. The cooling is very close to the pcb under the card, which is a little worse. But with a couple of low heatsinks there is no problem.

Very impressive. In other words we can clock the card higher with Zalman’s passive cooler than we could with Gigabytes fan.
Yet the sky is not completly free from clouds, the memory is much more sensitive when we are using the passive cooling. Before the installation we could clock it up to 670 MHz without major artifacts but after the installation it’s enough with 665 MHz to get the whole screen garbagled.
With RAM heatsinks on the rear side of the card we probably would have managed, to a certain stage, to cure this but since the stability of max overclock is the same it feels like it doesn’t matter.

The mounting itself was a bit tricky when you were going to fit the cooling block on the GPU’s front, but after we’ve managed that everything went like a charm. The reports on the net which shows that it can take hours to install this product must come from people with the thumb in the middle of their hand.

It can be mentioned that the two massive heatsinks becomes very hot after an hour of full load usage. We have asked Zalman about this and they say that this is normal but if you are worried you can direct a small fan against the cooling unit. This would probably lead to better cooling but since the whole point here is that it is supposed to be passive cooling we never tested the opportunity (a Papst 80-120mm would probably have done the job without making any noise).
That the unit becomes so hot also leads to a temperature raise in your case unless you have good case ventilation. The computer we tested it on has no case fans at all and the air circulation is principly non-existent and yet we experienced no problems at all.

Since we hardly have any good references when it comes to this type of products it is hard to judge it on more objective basis. Yet our experiences of ZM80A-HP are almost exclusively good.
That you can cool the markets, for the moment, fastest video card with passive cooling and for free get a better cooling of at least the core is at least said brilliant.

Everything from the packaging, the manual and the final mounted product is great. The only problem we encountered during the tests is as mentioned that the memory on the back side gets a little too hot, but since it did not affect our overclocking it has not so much of importance.
Otherwise one of the few negative aspects is that the card steals an extra PCI slot.

The price is fine but 28 dollars would maybe have been more appropriate. A nice alternative would have been that Zalman sent heatsinks for the memory.

Overall we think that this is a very impressive product and the few flaws which existed was absolutely nothing that affected the overall impression. If you are looking for a quiet computer but have doubts about having water running in it, this product is the best you can find, which after careful consideration gives this product the award Editor’s Choice:

+ Good manual
+ Good cooling on the GPU
+ Absolutely silent

Thanks to Zalman for making this review possible!