New Vapor-Chamber Cooling Solution Coming to ATI Graphics Cards

Need a new cooling solution, even for overclocking? CT Electronics Limited, a Vapor Chamber (VC) cooling solution provider announced its GVC-1 graphics card cooler.

Utilizing the Multiwick and Boiling-enhanced technologies (belonging to its own holding company, Convergence Technologies Limited), the GVC-1 was co-developed with Dr. Gamal Refai-Ahmed, an AMD fellow and Chief Thermal Architect. The new GVC-1 is nearly half the footprint of the stock-cooler for the ATI Radeon HD4870. During testing, the GVC-1 outperformed the stock cooler by nearly 15 percent, translating into advantages for overclocking and acoustic noise.

According to Dr. Steven Lee, Chairman & CEO of CT Electronics:

“The GVC-1 provides enabling technology to AMD’s 55-nm platform and offers additional design flexibility to accommodate the evolving market conditions, and that in addition to performance advantages, all our products can also be sampled on a FreeForm platform, which is a fast-turn-around platform developed to meet the break-neck pace of the electronics industry.”

Nelson Fan, President & COO of CT Electronics Limited, added:

“Unlike competing products that requires significant upfront tooling investment and turnaround time measured in the months, the FreeForm platform allows interested parties to quickly ‘try’ the benefit of our vapor chambers with minimal tooling costs and typical turnaround time of 2-weeks. Thus, while the saving in tooling cost is important, more important is that the coolers will not slow down the system development time, which often needs to go through several iterations.”

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Now all that techno-babble aside, the 15 percent increase in performance of this new vapor chamber is pretty impressive over the stock cooler. A lot of general PC consumers have this knack of tossing their systems into less than ideal locations or in poorly cooled cases. This 15 percent increase would greatly benefit in this area in systems from large OEMs. When it comes to enthusiasts however, if it’s on the card when they buy it, it’s more than likely going to come off to be replaced with something else. Some benchmark results comparing this cooler to after-markets would be nice in the future to draw final conclusions. Would be a shame to see this idea turn into ‘vapor’.