Cool Your 8800 GT – The Duorb and HR-03 GT Reviewed

Cooler Performance

Sure, the shiny parts on both of the coolers looks great but they are only helpful if they work as advertised and can cool better than the single slot cooler that NVIDIA designed originally.  For my testing I simply used a reference NVIDIA 8800 GT card and tested it with the original cooler, the Thermaltake Duorb and the Thermalright HR-03 GT both with and without a basic case fan installed on it.

Idle Temperatures

First let’s take a look at how these coolers perform when the GPUs are in a basically idle Windows Vista desktop.

The stock cooler keeps the GPU at a temperature of 57C but all three of our aftermarket testing configurations perform much better.  The passively cooled Thermalright HR-03 GT is able to keep the GPU at 47C while both the actively cooled HR-03 GT and the Thermaltake Duorb cool it to 40C!  That drop in idle temps is about 42% lower!

Okay, what happens when we put these cards through a barrage of tests in Crysis?

Load Temperatures

As we saw in our introduction, the stock cooler gets HOT and the GPU even hotter.  Our screenshot of the NVIDIA monitoring application reports a temperature of 84C though it was as high as 87C before we could take the screen shot.  The Thermalright HR-03 GT gets even hotter when taken as-is and without a fan installed.  Our screenshot reports an 89C result though it was as high as 91C!!  This temperature would definitely improve in an enclosed case with good airflow and should allow for passive and silent cooling about on par with NVIDIA’s stock cooler.

Both the Thermaltake Duorb and Thermalright HR-03 GT with a fan on it do much better in our tests.  The Duorb is reporting a 47C temperature after some Crysis play time though the app reported as high as 49C.  The Thermalright cooler with its large heatpipe array and fan installed on it cools slightly better resulting in a reported 43C load temp though we saw it at 46C as well.

With those test results it is easy to see why so many 8800 GT owners are going ahead with plans to buy after market GPU coolers.  A drop in load time temperatures from 87C to 47C is simply amazing and either speaks well of Thermaltake and Thermalright or speaks poorly on behalf of NVIDIA’s engineers: take your pick.  In the end though, it doesn’t really matter but serious gamers will enjoy an 85% drop in GPU temperatures with one of these options. 

As for the passive option, Thermalright has provided it for those that really want it but I would still prefer to go with a 2-slot cooling solution with active cooling that run relatively quiet rather than risk damage to hardware for pure silence.