Introduction

It seems to me that not too long ago I can remember clocking the snot out of my ATI X800 series cards. Soon after very limited clocking, I realized that the stock "boomerang" cooler on my X800 GTO wasn't going to do the job. So off to the forums I went for advice. At the time I was directed to the VF-700 and VF-900 cooler from Zalman. Now, I can remember that there was a pretty significant drop in temperatures with my first VF-700 that ran me about $30. A bit later I got my hands on an X850 XTPE and learned how to voltmod. What came next was the need for a better cooling solution, so I opted to get a VF-900 for around the $50 mark. The cooler was good, but still not what I was looking for.

Typically after that I ended up water cooling most of my cards until I disassembled my loop and retired it for a bit. Since then I just clocked things a bit with the stock coolers with no real thoughts or concerns for aftermarket cooling. The last GPU cooler I tested here was sort of a failure and I had no real desire to use it on my own machine. So back to stock air cooling I went.

Today ZEROtherm has quite the task on their hands, they get to allow a slightly disgruntled reviewer sample one of their GPU cooling solutions. This in no way means I won't give them a fair shake, but they are up against a guy who isn't bothered to run components a little warm on stock cooling. ZEROtherm has sent me the CoolMaxx 2000 GPU cooler to test. Let's see if they can convert a stock cooler user to want to keep their cooler on one of my dedicated folding cards.