Evercool's Turbo 2
Evercool's Turbo 2
Best price found: $15.99
A relative unknown in the VGA cooling scene, Evercool's hardware certainly looks capable, and the price is right. But will it deliver?
The Hardware
The Turbo 2 has the lowest MSRP of any cooler in this roundup, but it appears to sport some capable cooling hardware. Heat pipes pull heat from the GPU cooling block to large radiators that are held away from the cooler, and air is pushed past them by a fan near the radiators. The cooling block is all copper and the fins are aluminum, a nice surprise in the budget price range. The only indication of its low price is the plastic cover painted to look metallic, sloppy glue holding the badge on the fan, and a lack of memory heatsinks. Still, it is performance that counts, not looks.
Evercool's Turbo 2 package
Installation
Installation of the Turbo 2 is very straightforward on the X1900, although not quite exactly how the instructions indicate. The cooler has a number of pre-tapped holes in the bottom and you simply have to use the correct ones to fit your cooler. In the case of the X1900, the instructions showed four holes to use, but I could only get two to fit the card. Still, this is acceptable, as two holes are quite sufficient for mounting a VGA cooler.
No heat sinks for the memory made it that much easier to install, and we're not all that concerned about the omission - the effectiveness of heat sinks to cool memory is far from proven. Still, it would have been a nice touch.
The included power cable was a 3-pin motherboard fan type, which is great if you have a spare header on the motherboard, but kind of a pain if you don't. Luckily I had a Molex-to-3-pin adapter lying around, otherwise I would have been in trouble. All of these coolers should come with a Molex power adapter, in my opinion.
