DeepCool V6000
I’m going to preface this by letting you that nobody is selling this cooler in the US right now. We were promised that the V6000 would be for sale in North America through moddersmart.com when we agreed to include the product in our roundup, but it isn’t available there yet. The DeepCool representative says the cooler launched last month and the company is in talks with distributors. The suggested MSRP is $60.
The DeepCool V6000 is a generic graphics card cooler that will work on a long list of graphics cards, including the Radeon HD 5800- and GeForce GTX 400-series boards.
The V6000 is another large model, weighing in at 759 grams (~1 lb. 6.6 oz.) The cooler is 65 mm wide by 110.5 mm tall by 212.5 mm long. While it has the shortest length of the coolers in our roundup, it is the widest.
This cooler features six heatpipes attached to a cooling block and fins, all made of aluminum. Two 92 mm case fans are used to create an advertised 66 CFM of airflow. The fans are held to the cooler by wire retainers, and they do a good job of securing them.
The downside to using standard case fans is that this cooler requires a pair of three-pin fan headers on the motherboard. We’re surprised that DeepCool didn’t include a Molex adapter to provide power to the unit, something that would make installation simpler for many users.
The package contains the cooler, an installation guide, the fans, RAM and VRM heatsinks, in addition to a syringe of thermal paste. The first step is to install the fans on the cooler using the mounting hardware.
Assuming the GeForce GTX 480 reference cooler has already been removed, the contact surfaces have to be cleaned and installation can begin. First, the RAM and VRM heatsinks must be applied, and DeepCool’s method of application is thermal tape.
Thermal tape can be a fine tool, and it allows some flexibility if you want to migrate your cooler to another graphics card later (as it is usually possible to remove thermal tape). Unfortunately, our DeepCool V6000 test sample includes the worst thermal tape I have ever used. It is barely sticky enough to keep the heat sinks attached to the card, and I fear (it turns out rightfully so) that the sinks will fall off when the card is heated under load. I contacted DeepCool and was assured that the problem was reported to the R&D department. Just prior to publishing, I was informed that the thermal tape problem has been solved. This is great news, but unfortunately we don't have a fixed sample on-hand for testing. All we can demonstrate are results from the flawed version.
Assuming the RAM and VRM sinks are attached, thermal paste is applied to the GPU and the V6000 is attached to the graphics card. There are a number of screw holes on the heat sink for different boards, so it's simply a matter of lining up the mounting holes that correspond to the card we're using. Four screws later and the heatsink is in place—we make sure that we don’t forget to attach both cables to fan headers on the motherboard.
As with all of the coolers in our roundup, this graphics card and cooler combo consumes three expansion slots on the motherboard.
