Thermalright has launched a new VGA cooler called the Shaman, after being missing in the VGA Cooler sector for some time. They’ve been active in the CPU Cooler sector however. The Shaman still sees Thermalright’s typical design cues for heatsinks. Lots of aluminum fins, and that’s it. This Shaman does not use the now-popular HDT technique (Heatpipe Direct Touch) which were made famous by Xigmatek.

The package here comes with a TY-140 fan, which is a 14cm fan. Two fan clippers are provided, the clippers use 4-pin installation method, and you can actually use your own 12cm fan instead of the 14cm fan provided. Of course, the package will also come with thermal paste and ram heatsinks. Thermalright mentioned that 9cm fans cannot be installed onto this heatsink.

The Shaman has an 8-pipe heatsink with 6mm diameter; the fins are rather thin, thus making heat dissipation area very large due to very nice stacking from Thermalright.

Here’s a picture of the heatsink after being fitted onto an Asus GTX460 Overclocked graphic card.

Here’s some GPU-Z shot of the heatsink compared to stock cooler of the Asus GTX460 Overclocked graphic card. See how well the Shaman performed compared to stock cooler.

When idle, the difference is about 5⁰C. The Shaman is able to pull down GPU temperature from 28⁰C to 23⁰C, which is not bad.

The Shaman truly shines when it’s under heavy usage. When the card is being stressed to 100-percent load, the Shaman is able to pull down the temperature to 56⁰C from the stock cooler’s 72⁰C. That’s about 16⁰C difference, which is very awesome.

The Shaman VGA cooler is able to let users choose between ‘low’ and ‘high’ setting for the fan. Low setting would mean the fan spinning at 800RPM while high setting would mean the fan spinning at 1,200RPM. However, if you see the GPU-Z shots below, you’ll notice that there’s no difference in temperature at all between the two settings. Load and idle temperature stays the same for both. Thus there’s no need to set ‘high’ since it’ll be very noisy if you run it at 1,200RPM.

SOURCE via Chiphell