What do you think of when you hear the word "hurricane"? Words like wind, rain, destruction, Katrina or New Orleans? How about words like graphics cards cooler or VGA cooler? No, we didn't think so! With so much negativity associated with the word hurricane, let's hope ZEROtherm's new VGA cooler doesn't live up to its devastating namesake!

The Hurricane HC92-CU consists of a full copper heatsink which is attached to the base of the cooler via four copper heatpipes. These heatpipes transfer the heat away from the GPU and into the fins where the attached 92mm fan cools everything back down. This process works very well indeed, keeping our test nVidia 8800 GTX nice and cool at 67° during an hour-long loop of 3DMark06. This was done with the fan set to its minimum speed i.e. the quietest setting.

The blue LED fan supplied with the Hurricane is a standard 3-pin model and is designed to connect to the supplied fan controller. This controller works in a similar way to Zalman's FANMATE2 and when connected, you can change the speed of the fan to a speed that suits you. From a noise point of view, the fan is very quiet. Its noise level starts at only 19 dBA and rises up to 40 dBA at full speed - not that you would ever need to set it to run so fast!

One feature that ZEROtherm state this cooler has, is something called 3-in-1. The "1" refers to the cooler and the 3 refers to Aerodynamic, Overclocking and Fanless. Aerodynamic is basically the cooler with the silver ducting attached. The airflow is guided in such a way that it cools virtually the whole of the graphics card. The second is Overclocking. This feature requires you to remove the silver ducting (like in the image above). ZEROtherm state that this will reduce the GPU temperature and they are not wrong. Our 8800 GTX ran 3° cooler without the ducting installed! The final feature is Fanless. This speaks for itself and should only be used with a low-end graphics card which has a TDP (Thermal Design Power) of under 50W.

Installation

ZEROtherm's Hurricane HC-92 is an imposing VGA cooler. It is one of the largest VGA coolers in our product range with the Thermalright HR-03 being the only cooler which is larger, especially when you consider that the HR-03 still requires a fan. The Hurricane will occupy the graphics card's adjacent expansion slot and if the silver ducting is not removed it will also prevent the next slot from being used.

Product differences

There are two versions of the Hurricane available: the HC92-CU and the HC92-CU 8800. The HC92-CU 8800 is identical to the HC92-CU except it comes with green RAM heatsinks which are designed to cool the additional sources of heat found only on nVidia's 8800 series cards.