Best VGA cooler for 8800GTX?

Hello,

I want to upgrade to an 8800GTX (only 1) & want to be safe & change the stock cooler to a better 3rd party VGA cooler.

What is the best one to keep the coolest ?

Note air cooling only as I dont have a water cooling set up.

Thank you,
Jeff

Are you sure you need to do this? I got an 8800 GTX and I'm happy with the stock cooler. Are you planning to overclock the card a lot?

Some factory overclocked cards like eVGA's come with better coolers than others, by the way.

The only real option is the HR-03 PLUS.

The stock coolers are the best because they exhaust the hot air out the back. Other oem coolers might do a better job of vga-heat to air heat transfer, but then you have to get that hot air out of your case before it affects the cpu. Adding a slot cooler below the 8800 is very effective. It removes the small amount of hot air that exits the 4 slits in the 8800 and gets it out the back quickly.

I can't let this thread die this easily. Am I going insane or is the Thermalright HR-03 PLUS the ONLY GeForce 8800GTX third party cooler on the market. There has got to be a better solution that the monstrosity that is the HR-03 PLUS. It's huge and with it's alternative configuration it's ok with one card but not SLI since the second card could not be fit in that alternative configuration including the 92mm fan to cool it. If you put it in normal configuration on the bottom SLI VGA Card then you take up 4 slots which might include precious PCI slots of things like Sound Cards or Wireless PCI or other things. Plus in alternate configuration the top SLI card may have issues with sharing space on some Large CPU coolers. So obviously someone needs to come up with an alternate design that is better than stock coolers and is more friendly towards SLI configurations.

My question to the Tom's Hardware experts, if they happen to be lurking here and can ask the industry a question or two, would be, "Why hasn't any other company developed a third party cooler for the GeForce 8800GTZ? Is the market really all that small for 8800 VGA Coolers?"

Edit Add: I finally found one. Zalman VF1000 and the Zalman ZM90-HP which looks like a knock off of the HR-03 PLUS. I guess the Zalman VF1000 is my only option for a space saving VGA Cooler for at least the bottom SLI Card.

Anyone know of any others VGA Cooler models that work on 8800 series? Add them here.