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Thermaltake Extreme Giant III
Date: Monday, June 14, 2004
Author: Rbreb13
Provided By: Xoxide
Page: 1 of 3
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To start I would like to thank Xoxide for sending this cooler for review. The first thing I noticed after seeing the flashy packaging was how heavy this thing is. I really wasn't expecting a GPU cooler to be this heavy (490 grams). As you can see from the picture the packaging is very attractive and eye catching. My second impression was that this thing is huge. It has a blower fan along one edge that also makes it very tall. Rather than go into the detailed specifications you can view them here. It has Dual Heatpipes, two cooling fans, copper ramsinks and a fan controller included. The fan controller fits in a PCI slot and is controlled from the rear of the PC. I'm not so sure about how this will work out. I really don't like the idea of having to reach around to the back of my PC every time I need to adjust the fan speed or turn on the blower. The way some people setup their systems this would be a real pain. I'm thinking of modding the switch into an unused 3 ½ inch floppy bay. But that's a project for another day.
The package contents:
There is a lot of stuff packed into this small package. The user's manual is small but appears to be very detailed about the installation. I'll let you know how it goes after the installation.
I was going to use my ATI 9700 Pro for this installation but unfortunately it does not have the necessary 4 holes in the PCB. The only card I have that will work is a GeForce 3 Ti500. Oh well at least if something goes wrong I won't be out much in the way of dollars!
It seems after looking around that most cards (ATI and Nvidia) have 2-4 holes in them. It seems that most, if not all 3rd party manufacturers do have at least 2 mounting holes. So installation shouldn't be a problem. The only problem with mounting holes appears to be with cards Built by ATI. My 9700 Pro was a pre-order of the very first ones to be released and does not have any holes in the PCB. So be sure to check your cards before ordering.
The GF3 Ti500 I'll be using burned out the stock fan a year ago. I replaced it with a Tt CORB (Thermaltake Crystal Orb) and added ramsinks. It has much better cooling capabilities than the stock fan did, so a comparison between stock and the Giant III is not going to be possible. I am interested to see what improvements (if any) the Giant III will have over what I consider to be one of the best GPU coolers on the market, given its low cost. The CORB's can be found for 9 dollars or less usually. So we'll see how a $10.00 GPU cooler compares to a $30.00+ cooler.
The system I'll be using:
Abit NF7-s Rev. 2.0 Nforce2
AMD 1800+ (physically unlocked w/conductive pen) @ 8.5*191=1625 MHz w/ PcToys AeroMaxx HSF (Vantec AeroFlow clone)
2*512 Extreme DDR PC3000
VisionTek GeForce 3 Ti500 (stock clock of 240 MHz core and 500 MHz memory)
Windows XP Professional (setup as most desktop users would)
Other normal stuff
This system doesn't have much installed on it. All it's usually used for is crunching the Find-a-Drug distributed computing project.
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