Presentation and technology
Tidy presentation from Zalman, as usual. It may look a little complicated, but the clear and helpful instruction booklet spells everything you need to know.
Opening the box shows us exactly what's required to make the cooler work. Two sets of blocks are provided for the front and back of the card, and an extra set of parts is included. It's important to realise that the ZM80A-HP will only work with graphics cards that feature mounting holes around the GPU. Don't worry, as the majority of video cards do. The only modern cards that I can think of which don't are the Matrox Parhelia and GeForce FX. The latter arrives with its own cooling system.
So how does it work ?. The two large heatsinks for the front and back provide the answer. The Zalman ZM80A-HP works from the premise that even modern GPUs (or VPUs as ATi now like to call them) can be cooled passively if one has enough surface area to work with. Weighing in at around 400g and featuring 1300cm2 of potential cooling area, the ZM80A should be up to the task. One large heatsink would not have been enough, probably, so Zalman have decided on the use of two. A heatpipe (bottom right) is used to effectively connect the two heatsinks together for maximum cooling ability.
The heatpipe is used to ferry the heat away from the front heatsink and on to the back. As the front of the card becomes hotter and hotter after absorbing the heat produced by the GPU, the connected heatpipe's internal liquid turns from fluid to vapour. With the back of the card cooler than the front, the vapour is naturally drawn there and condenses back to liquid, thereby giving up its heat to the rear heatsink. The liquid then travels back down to the hot end to repeats the process again and again. Think of the heatpipe as a heat carrier from front to back.
Enough theory. You can see that we have two sets of blocks. The ones you use will depend upon how far the mounting holes are away from the GPU itself. Using a reference ATi Radeon 9700 Pro, I used the smaller of the two sets of blocks.
Everything you need is provided, including a screwdriver, screws, thermal paste, washers and a detailed instruction book. You should have some idea of how it works, now on to installation.
