Video Cooling Issues

Mounting considerations

The next problem comes with mounting a cooling unit on the video card. For CPUs, it's much easier because their packaging is made to have a heatsink and fan attach to it. Video card manufacturers, however, don't have those issues on mind when designing their video cards, as they prefer to worry about graphics performance and not the logistics of sticking a heatsink on the card. Thus, the usual method of mounting is some sort of thermally conducive adhesive pad. This can lend itself to problems, though, as I have had a cooler slowly detach itself from a Voodoo2 chip due to a weak adhesive pad. Otherwise, there are units that don't attach anything to the card. These are typically the easiest to mount, for obvious reasons.

Chipset layout

This is one of the more major problems involved with video card cooling. Because of the variety of different video card chipsets and video card manufacturers, there is a wide divergence of how the actual chips are placed on video cards. Although there are reference designs put out by the company that creates the chipset, the actual card manufacturers can lay out the chips differently if they choose to do so. As a result, it is difficult for a cooler manufacturer to make a cooler because they don't want to "pigeon-hole" themselves by investing the time, money, and manpower to make a cooler for a specific video chipset and not have it be hugely successful. As a result, there aren't a whole lot of video card coolers that are made for specific video chipsets. They do exist, though, for the more popular chipsets. Otherwise, you are stuck using more general coolers that stores are marketing as "video card coolers", which in our experience has been little more than 486 heatsinks and fans, because they were very slim.