The Heatsink Base Assembly

Smaller heatsink base assembly

Longer heatsink base assembly

Learning from their mistake in the ZM80-HP, Zalman redesigned the ZM80A-HP's heatsink base assembly to fit more graphics cards. Like the ZM80-HP, the ZM80A-HP comes with two different heatsink base assemblies. The shorter base assembly is designed for most GeForce 2 Ti-class cards while the longer one is for newer cards of the GeForce 4 Ti class. This is to account for the discrepancies in the distances in the mounting holes of various graphics cards.

What was improved in the ZM80A-HP is the more elevated front heatsink (compared to the lower one in the ZM80-HP). This prevents tall components like capacitors from interfering with the heatsink's installation, thereby correcting the biggest flaw in the earlier ZM80-HP model. In addition, the 'spring clip' mechanism was redesigned to be more flexible, thereby allowing the ZM80A-HP to be installed onto virtually any card with just two mounting holes!

Check out the yellow plastic piece next to the base assemblies. It is meant to be stuck to the bottom of the back heatsink base assembly. Evidently, Zalman is using it to prevent the back base assembly from coming into direct contact with the back of the card and short-circuiting it! Such careful attention to details in the ZM80A-HP is laudable.

ZM50-HP vs ZM80A-HP
Comparing the base assembly

As you can see, the ZM80A-HP's heatsink base assembly is significantly larger than the ZM50-HP's. This makes it more flexible as it can be fitted onto almost all GPUs. I found that this heatsink base fitted exactly onto my GeForce 2 Ti GPU.

The ZM80A-HP's front heatsink base assembly was also redesigned to accomodate Radeon GPUs that come with protective shims. They were able to do this by extruding the base a little as you can see from the picture above.