Gigabyte has merely use most of their heat sink power house in the manufacturing core 7i’s and the more extreme version of their motherboard design chipsets like the example of the P45t-extreme with an extra long arm for external effective cooling and an effective way to be the heaviest thing around, with all of the copper heat sinks and fins plus the inclusion of the water-cooling block for the Northbridge gave it the real name of freak extreme in my opinion, but now we want to look in the more familiar year of 2007, like the same as the 1950Xt passive cooling from Power colour, we will see another excessive cooler to look at.
The heat sink itself is pretty tall, although the top blue plastic section can be removed to drop the height by around 20mm. One of the sides on the removable duct is sealed off, so the air is meant to be pushed towards to rear of the case, however we can’t really see this happening as the air will be predominantly pushed against the side of the case and out in all directions, or it should work in conjunction with an existing case fan to remove the air as an exhaust.
It isn’t that obvious that the fan pulls air up through it and expels it out the top – most people expect air to be sucked in the top and pushed down, so it’s a likely possibility that the top fan will compete with side intake creating more noise from a contradicting airflow.
Build quality is good for the unit’s core heat pipes and fins, but the blue plastic is flimsy and quite easily broken. The Gigabyte branded fins on the side seem to serve no real purpose and are easily removed by just gently pulling with two fingers. The horizontal veins are styled to look like air ducts and reiterate the look of the metal fins below. The fan is built into this shroud, so there’s no way to remove it for something different should you want something larger or you have a special silent one you’d prefer, having said that, at the included “silent†setting, the fan is actually extremely quiet (although not truly silent).
The bottom fan does seemingly little as well – it may cool the base and there is air coming out of it, but it doesn’t seem to help the PWMs as we found it produces one highest PWM temperatures we’ve seen. The Scythe Mugen (formerly Infinity) gave a higher temperature but that’s because the total airflow was very low and it completely missed the PWMs, whereas in contrast the Gigabyte should be pushing the air down into the PWM heat sink fins.
Depending on your tolerance it may look a bit gimmicky, especially the “fluorescent bands” and copious use of blue plastic and LEDs, but it does include a variable fan controller none the less. That may not be a novel addition but it’s extremely useful as you can install it at the front or back of a case. Installation is a bit more than just a pop in for the LGA775 socket, but it’s very simple and requires minimal effort. In comparison the AMD sockets just require a single clip and you’re job done. However we’re still concerned about the reasonably flimsy mounting plastic bracket for LGA775 CPUs if you’re transporting the case – the cooler is very tall and as such, top heavy.
