The Cooler

The cooler consists of three main parts - an aluminium heatsink with copper fins, a blower fan and a plastic shroud. It is designed to suck in air from below the card (when it's installed within a vertical case) and even from under the heatsink itself, and blow the air through the copper fins and out a large vent at the end of the cooler.

It is a solid, conventional cooler. Nothing fancy, like heatpipes. ATI traded efficiency and size for lower cost and weight by using an aluminium base instead of a full copper heatsink. But as long as it gets the job done, it doesn't really matter. However, if you are interested in overclocking the card to its maximum potential, then you will probably want to replace this cooler. Fortunately, it's very easy to do so.

If you look at the base of the heatsink, you will see imprint of the RV570 VPU's thermal paste.

Also note the vents under the heatsink. They not only allow the fan to suck in air from below the heatsink, they also allow the fan to blow some air below the heatsink to increase circulation and thermal dissipation.

The cooler not only cools the VPU, it also cools the memory chips. However, Sapphire used thick thermal tapes to make up for the difference in height (between the VPU and the memory chips). Such thick thermal tapes will reduce the amount of heat transmitted to the heatsink, which limits the cooler's effectiveness in actually cooling down the chips.

The fins are actually made from 36 U-shaped copper plates arranged in parallel. The VPU comes in contact roughly in the center of these fins. Too bad the design did not include a copper contact plate directly welded to the fins for better thermal conductivity.

This cooler uses an ADDA AD6512HB-TB3 blower fan. This is a brushless 65mm DC fan running at 12V. It is designated as a high-speed fan with a ball-bearing and a speed sensor. With a current draw of 0.40A, this fan has a power output of 4.8W.