HIS ICE3Q Coolers on par with other aftermarket VGA coolers?

[Breath_of_the_Dying]

I was thinking about cooling solutions for my next video card and I was wondering if the HIS ICE3Q cooler is sufficient or comparable to the well-known aftermarket coolers (is the ICE3Q version coolers considered an aftermarket cooler at all?). If it is a good cooler, then I'd be more inclined to buy that instead of getting another brand and installing another aftermarket cooler. I have no experience dealing with adding my own coolers so I was wondering if it's worth the risk of getting the wrong one or installing properly to save ~$40 (final pricing unknown).

Thanks for any help.

 

[cantankerous]

The ICE3 cooler is about as good as it is going to get for stock mounted cooling. It is almost exactly like the stock cooler on the X1950XTX which is leaps and bounds better than the stock cooler that was used on the X1900XTX. Cools better and is much quieter. If you are not inclined on purchasing a seperate cooler and installing it yourself I would hands down recommend the HIS card due to the ease of having the cooler already installed for you.

You could however look into an 8800GTS as it performs better and it too has a very nice stock cooler which is quite quiet.

 

[maverick777]

I have an ICEQ3 x1900xt and can tell you from experience that the cooler is VERY good. When I bought my card, the ICEQ3 was the ONLY HSF, aftermarket or not, that sent the exhaust out of the case instead of just blowing it down and circulating hot air around the case (Arctic Cooling and Zalman coolers included). The ICQ3 is in fact an Arctic Cooling HSF, just not one you can buy. I don't know if this is still the case or not. You'll be more than happy with the ICEQ3 version though. Spend the extra money and save yourself the trouble. It'll end up costing you about the same as buying another brand card and sticking an after market HSF on there yourself anyways.

 

[Bo_Fox]

My experience..

I got a X1900XTX, and it heated up to 95 degrees Celsius (stock cooling) in my closed case. So, I searched very hard for a HIS IceQ3 cooler but could not find it anywhere by itself on Ebay or the trade forums. Also, my wife's computer case has a strong UV theme (mostly purple) and it would have been a great addition to have another UV-reactive cooler under the video card. I refused to go with the aftermarket air-cooling solutions like Zalman's VF900 that I tried out for a few days because it actually performed WORSE than ATI's own stock and just heated up the case even more without any exhaust. The Zalman VF900 simply would not allow any kind of overclocking at all--and the card still crashed under stressful conditions.

After hunting around--I saw that the HIS X1900XT or XTX's were completely out of stock at reasonable prices. So the solution was to get a HIS X1900GT with IceQ3 cooler from Newegg and take it off, replace it with X1900XTX's stock cooler and then sell it back on Ebay.

The result-- HIS's IceQ3 cools my X1900XTX 10 degrees Celsius better at the maximum of 3500 RPM than ATI's stock cooler at 5500 RPM! The whole card (memory, voltage regulators, etc..) is also much much cooler -- more than 10 degrees cooler!

It's also much quieter--the noise does not have that high-pitched annoying whine that overwhelms all the other fans in the case.

I love it, man-- ATI's X1950XTX's cooler is based on that IceQ3 design and probably performs like 2 or 4 degrees better due to longer copper fins but I don't like the red color. It's also a little louder due to the fan blades being straight which exerts more air pressure at the cost of turbulence that causes noise.

Well, Nvidia's G80 cooler is the best GPU air-cooling design up to date, regardless.

 

[Bo_Fox]

One note:

It has special screws--but if you have the right size philips screw for it, it can do the job pretty easily.

 

[Bo_Fox]

I have an ICEQ3 x1900xt and can tell you from experience that the cooler is VERY good. When I bought my card, the ICEQ3 was the ONLY HSF, aftermarket or not, that sent the exhaust out of the case instead of just blowing it down and circulating hot air around the case (Arctic Cooling and Zalman coolers included). The ICQ3 is in fact an Arctic Cooling HSF, just not one you can buy. I don't know if this is still the case or not. You'll be more than happy with the ICEQ3 version though. Spend the extra money and save yourself the trouble. It'll end up costing you about the same as buying another brand card and sticking an after market HSF on there yourself anyways.

It's like Arctic Cooling Silencers, but with a heatpipe and a much better, bigger copper design that also separately cools the memory chips.