Xigmatek Battle-Axe VD964 VGA Cooler



Introduction
Once again Xigmatek set a new milestone to the brand new VGA cooler that ultilising H.D.T Technology to provide a more efficient cooling for the power hunger VGA cards. It feature 4 pieces of H.D.T heatpipes, each 6mm in size. It also uses 2 silent fans with the special mounting mechanism to minimize the vibrations.


Features



Specifications


This post has been edited by sup3rfly: May 13 2008, 01:21 AM

Package Contents

The cooler come with a very nice and secured box.


Front View


Back View




The cooler is covered in a very secure way by thee pvc holder


Accessories that come with the cooler

This post has been edited by sup3rfly: May 14 2008, 12:35 AM

The Battle-Axe!!!


The front view of the cooler mounted to the 8800GTS 512MB


The back view








The ultra low noise fan


Battle-Axe!!!

This post has been edited by sup3rfly: May 14 2008, 12:35 AM

Test Bed
CPU: Intel C2D E8500 @ 3.15GHz
Mobo: Asus Maximus Formula
Memory: 2 x 1 GB Crucial DDR2 Memory PC5300
GPU: Gigabyte 8800GTS 512MB
PSU: Zalman 600W PSU
CPU Cooling: Custom Watercooling

Software Used
OS: Windows XP SP2
Benchmark Software: Crysis + Crysis Benchmark Tool 1.05 Final
Monitoring Software: HWMonitor

Test Method
The test will be conducted using 3 different flavor, stock speed, semi overclocked and high overclocked. It will also be stressed under 2 fan speeds, low and high speed. The reason to do so is to differentiate the noise level of the cooler fan and the reason for doing 3 different speeds is to provide a clear understanding on the results for different types of users, not all users overclock their hardwares at the max speed all the time.
By using Crysis Benchmark Tool 1.05, the settings will be set to High and the resolution will be set to 1280 x 1024. The idle temperature reading will be the value showing in the "Value" field in HWMonitor and the load temperature reading will be record down according to the "Max" value field in the HWMonitor. Alright, lets starts the test shall we???

Results

Fan Speed @ High


Fan Speed @ Low

This post has been edited by sup3rfly: May 15 2008, 09:59 PM

Issue Encountered
As highlighted by shawty, the cooler is not meant for G92 GPUs, its a fact that the Battle-Axe have some fitting problem with the G92 GPUs, the issue is due to that the GPU core doesn't come with a ihs like G80, this caused the cooler to sit lower than it normally did hence the 2 of the heatpipes is actually hitting the ram sink. Please refer to the picture below for more understanding n the issue.



The highlighted part is where the issue lies. As you can see the heatpipe is actually causing the ramsink to lift up by a lot, which means its not touching the memory. From this issue, the heatsink is not able to be mounted properly to the core as well, this will cause a massive problem as its not 100% functioning how it suppose to function. To solve this, I have removed the ramsink from the affected area to allow the cooler to be mounted properly. From what you guys can see the results is pretty impressive comparing the low speed results for Battle-Axe is the same or lower for the high speed fan on a stock cooler. I m sure you wont want your stock heatsink fan to be operate @ full speed all the time as it produces very very loud sounds.

Conclusion
The Xigmatek impress us again with the H.D.T gpu cooler. Overall its pretty impressive i must say. The fan is dead silent even at high speed fan. I have provided some finding of the issue to the Xigmatek engineer hopefully they will look into it to allow this cooler to fully support G92 GPU as well. Aside from that, I hope they would include more ramsink as G92 has more area that needed to be cooled down. I hope they can redesign the cooler's fin to allow more airflow to be flow to the ramsink to provide a better cooling for the overall card

Alright, last but not least, I would like to take this opportunity to thanks ckhoong for providing me this lovely cooler to play with. I hope you get well soon. Thanks for viewing also forumers

P/S: Sorry for the picture quality, pictures taken from my old SE K750i.

This post has been edited by sup3rfly: May 15 2008, 10:30 PM

Lets see how this performs comparing to Auras Frigde JES988.. haha.. Cant wait for the review..

8800GTS 512MB is G92 AKA naked core no?

yeah the only gpu i have...so no choice i know the cooler is not meant for g92 tho.... but it still work fine so i dont find any problem with it

How's the fan noise level like? Could a baby sleep or it wakes up a dead body?

a baby shd be able to sleep and a dead body wont wake up... i got no dead body to try out
its not a noisy fans dun worry low speed but efficient fans hehe

The thing is, when you use Xigmatek Battle-Axe VD964 on naked core based GPU, only 2 heatpipes were in contact with the GPU.

Seriously, Xigmatek Battle-Axe VD964 is only good for Nvidia G80 GPU based graphic card since Nvidia G80 is the only GPU that has IHS [Ignoring the old-old GPU lah].

yeah it doesnt ultilise all the heatpipes but the thing is by using 2 heatpipes its good enough to tame down the G92 "heater" already...ya get wat i mean
its a waste that it doesnt ultilise 4 of the heatpipes, i really wish i have a G80 and see if i can remove the IHS to fit on G92 since on the pcb there is actually the same as G80 iinm

i will try to get a 88ultra from my friend to test on it...hopefully i can get hold of it la...if i can i will redo another round of tests and add in the results of g80...

This post has been edited by sup3rfly: May 14 2008, 07:53 AM

It'll be better if you have any of those G80 graphic cards together with the Battle-Axe & HR-03 Plus to compare.

HR-03 Plus has 6 heatpipes with non HDT technology.
Battle-Axe has 4 heatpipes with HDT technology.

can fit 3870 onot?

wee looks superb.. faster show us the result..
btw where u got it from ?

currently its not available in malaysia yet...
anyway results is up.... check it out guys

yerps, i had some probs with my G92 too.
guess i'll post up my results later

lol more to come XD stay tuned

fly, any chance to have this thing fight out with the TR?

to all:
TR or baxe better? (disregarding price)

and if consider price vs performance, which better?

Kinda hard, as most of us have left G80 for a very long time.

I'd choose Battle-Axe over HR-03 Plus.
I believe Battle-Axe will win on both performance & price matter.

With Battle-Axe, you don't have to buy any fans. Plus, Battle-Axe comes with two fans, which it blows directly to the whole card.
While for HR-03 Plus, you still need to buy a 92MM fan while still not being able to cool the whole card as the 92MM fan will only be blowing to the middle of the card.