Date:
Monday , July 07, 2008
Author:
Marc Adams
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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EVGA AKIMBO

If you are looking to add an "aftermarket" cooler to your very hot video card, EVGA looks to be serving up some very fine cooling with their AKIMBO cooling systems it launched a few months ago.

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Temperatures

For our stock testing our 8800GT is kept at its default settings of 600MHz core speed and 900MHz vMEM speed. The ambient temperature of the room is kept at a steady 25ºC. Idle scores are measured after a fifteen minute period of inactivity. The screen saver is disabled and no programs are running. To measure our load temps we turn to the ATITOOL application. Using the ‘scan for artifacts’ option places a constant heavy load on the card and really heats things up. Again, we apply this load for at least fifteen minutes before taking any measurements.

Stock Settings

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At stock settings the AKIMBO shows a nice drop in temperature over the NVIDIA stock cooling solution. When you crank the fan speed up to 100% the temps drop even further and start to become competitive with other aftermarket coolers. The sound levels at this setting, though, will make you want to use sound dampening ear phones.

Ooverclock Settings

For overclock testing our 8800GT’s speeds are bumped up to 700MHz core speed and 1000MHz vMEM speed. No voltage modifications were done.

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The results for our overclocked temps are similar to the previous charts. The AKIMBO performs better than the stock heat sink and fan by a significant amount and even more so when the fan speed is turned up. While it is one of the best performing OEM cooling solutions to be offered in a long time it still trails the aftermarket products by upwards of 11ºC.