Zalman has been one of the most innovative companies in PC cooling. They have created everything from silent water cooling products to northbridge coolers, alll of which usually have two things in common; they are very quiet and usually something that has never been done before. The first time I heard of Zalman was after the release of their ZM80A-HP heat pipe GPU cooler. The product held up to its good reputation. Today we will be examining what else Zalman has been cooking up in their GPU line with the ZM80D-HP heat pipe along with the optional ZM-OP1 fan.

The ZM80D-HP expands on Zalman’s already excellent design by adding a second heat pipe that connects the front and back plates. The second heat pipe is especially nice, in theory, for cooling newer GPUs that give off more and more heat. The ZM80D-HP also includes heat sinks for the memory on your graphics card. The heat sinks for the memory are built to size so they will definitely fit with the heat pipe installed.

Specifications

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1. Weight: 350 g 2. Heat pipe: Gold plated copper tube 3. Dissipation material: Anodized Aluminum 4. Heat Dissipation Surface Area: 1350 cm2 5. VGA RAM Heatsink material: Anodized Aluminum 6. VGA RAM Heatsink weight: Front side: 2.9 g (EA) Backside: 1.2 g (EA)

Features

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1. This product was designed to optimize heat dissipation for excellent cooling performance. 2. Dual heatpipes increase heat transfer speed and enhance the cooling efficiency. 3. The fanless design ensures complete noiselessness and maintenance-free operation. 4. RAM heatsinks for cooling the VGA RAM. 5. Compatibility with virtually all types of VGA cards allows reinstallation when upgrading the VGA card. (Incompatible with VGA cards that do not have original heatsink holes measuring 3mm in diameter, or VGA cards on which the ZM80D-HP interferes with the card’s components.) 6. An Optional Fan (ZM-OP1, sold separately) can be attached to the heatsink directly without using a separate bracket.

What is a heat pipe?

Whether or not you have used a product with a heatpipe before you might be wondering what it is. The idea behind a heat pipe is quite simple; it carries heat from something to another area to be dispersed. A heat pipe is simply a metal wick enclosed inside a pressurized metal pipe with water inside. The GPU (graphics processing unit) gives off heat because power is running through it, and must have a heatsink on it because of the heat it generates. So the heat is transferred to the heatsink from the GPU, and the heat travels through the heatsink until it gets to the heat pipe. The water in the heat pipe is under a certain pressure(less pressure than sea level), because water under less pressure boils at a lower temperature than water at sea level. The water gets hot and eventually boils. When it boils it will start to move up because the GPU is facing down and the water is now boiling. The water eventually reaches the top and begins to be cooled down by something else, in this case the large, flat heatsink covering the heat pipe. With the heat now being dispersed off the top heatsink, the water travels back down the pipe and repeats the cycle. The idea of a heat pipe is quite interesting and ends up doing a very good job of cooling computer equipment down, it can be found on many GPU and CPU coolers.

First impressions:

Having owned a Zalman heat pipe before I expected a quite similar package, and that’s a good thing. Zalman always has included a plethora of extra parts, thermal grease and accessories and the ZM80D-HP doesn’t change that. Zalman included three packets of thermal grease, the thermal grease is a must have when installing a heat pipe because of how much heat needs to be transferred. They also include a screwdriver; you don’t have to search around for a different one because you know this one will fit all the screws perfectly. Quite a few spare parts are also included; some of the pieces needed for installation are quite small and easily lost by accident.

Top Row: Front of package; Back of package; Contents of Package.
Bottom Row: The included RAM heatsinks; Screws and the included screwdriver; Optional ZM-OP1 fan

Zalman also includes two different types of heatsinks, one for older Geforce 4 cards and one for newer cards, meaning you won’t be out luck as long as our graphics card has mounting holes. The two blocks are also quite hefty, with a surface area of 1350 cm2 combined. The included manual is one of the best I’ve ever seen; it has very detailed pictures and is written in excellent English. You shouldn’t have any trouble following the directions to install it, as long as you can follow directions of course.

Two sets of heatsink blocks; The back and front plate heatsinks; The two heatpipes.

Installation:

Installing the Zalman ZM80D-HP isn’t an easy process. But it is made easier by Zalman’s well written instruction manual. I’m not going to go into detail, about installing it, but I will tell you that it is necessary to follow Zalman’s instructions for the best results. It took me about an hour and a half to fully install the heat pipe on the graphics card and reinstall it into my system. Before you start though, have a clean work area setup and make sure your hands are clean, you might even want to wear an anti-static wrist band as you are handling expensive computer parts. As a note the ZM-OP1 fan is required for newer graphics such as the NVIDIA GeforceFX 5900 Ultra or ATI Radeon 9800 Pro. Here are some pictures from the installation process, please do not take these as a guide if you are planning to install a heat pipe, this is just an example of what it might look like.

Top Row: Front of graphics card with stock heatsink; Back of graphics card with stock heatsink; Front of card with cooler removed
Second Row: Front of card with RAM heatsinks installed; Back of card with RAM heatsinks installed; Second view of front with RAM heatsinks
Third Row: Front of card with heatsink installed; Back of card with heatsink insalled; Front of card with thermal paste applied.
Bottom Row: Frontside heatsink with thermal paste applied; Back of card with backside heatsink installed; Back of card completly installed.

Performance:

Of course, all the technology may be great, but if it doesn’t perform well it’s worthless. Thankfully the Zalman ZM80D-HP met all my expectations based on my previous experience with Zalman products. The stock cooler on my 9800 Pro is a very good cooler by itself, but the Zalman showed awesome performance gains. Since it also has sensor built into the die of the core, it made it very easy to test the temperatures using a program built for my graphics card by Tyan.
Here are the results of my tests.

As you can see the temperatures for both load and idle improved a lot, around 10º Celsius. This is an awesome improvement from the stock heatsink, and well worth the cost of the heat pipe. This ZM80D-HP can be very useful if your graphics card is already running very hot or you just want to make your case quieter.

Also, since the ZM80D-HP lowers temperatures in many cases, it should also allow for higher overclocks, and thus better performance in games. Here are the results from the stock and ZM80D-HP.

The ZM80D-HP gave me an extra 25 MHz core clock; almost doubling the overclock compared the default. Unfortunately lost 3 MHz on the memory, while the ZM80D-HP’s memory cooling may not be as good as the stock heatsink, the 25 MHz core gain is a trade off I am willing to take. To see the improvement the ZM80D-HP was allowing me to get I ran 3DMark01 Second Edition with 6X Antialiasing and 16X Anisotropic filtering.

I gained around 250 points when comparing the default clocks to the maximum overclocks with the stock cooler. Overclocking to this level with the ZM80D-HP is easily achievable because of its cooling potential, even though it is the maximum for the stock cooler. Now when we compare the stock cooler’s overclock to the ZM80D-HP I only gained about 170 points. While it’s not as much of a gain as before, it’s still decent and a nice performance boost to have. The reason it is lower is because the ZM80D-HP wouldn’t allow the memory to be overclocked as high as the stock cooler, so the only gain we are seeing is from the core. I’m pleased with the gains the ZM80D-HP gave me over the stock cooler.

Most of Zalman’s products, including the ZM80D-HP are also supposed to help eliminate noise. Even though the ZM80D-HP still requires you to use the ZM-OP1 fan if you have a new graphics card, the fan is very quiet in silent mode, only 20dB so it shouldn’t be a significant source of noise.

ZM80D-HP with ZM-OP1 fan courtesy of Zalman; ZM80D-HP and ZM-OP1 fan installed in system

Conclusion:

I am very pleased with the ZM80D-HP, it built on the already excellent foundation of previous Zalman heat pipe GPU coolers and added a 2nd heat pipe for better cooling performance. Hopefully this will allow it to be used on most brand new graphics cards like the Geforce 6800 Ultra or Radeon X800XT PE. The only complaint I have is that it’s hard to install, it takes a lot of time and is somewhat difficult, but I found the time that it took to install it well worth the end result. The performance of the ZM80D-HP was stunning, it lowered both my idle and load temps by almost 10ºC and allowed me to nearly double the overclock of the core. The fact that Zalman includes memory heat sinks is a big plus as well, because they are going to fit with the ZM80D-HP installed and work properly. I would recommend the ZM80D-HP to anyone looking to enhance the cooling on their graphics card, or just to loose some of the noise of coolers with fans if you have a midrange model. The ZM80D-HP is availible from Xoxide for $34.99 and the optional ZM-OP1 fan for $9.99.