Motor

Fins

Fan info

   That is not too bad, but of course at this point, there is no fan attached to anything. If nothing else, the fan included in the “plus” version is the part that makes the KuFormula unique. The cross flow fan is quite large, with a bit of a odd point that the motor is uncovered and spins freely in the open. It is smooth and has no real clearance problems, but extra wires in a case might rub up against it.

Fan mounted

another view

Very unique

   To attach the fan, there is once again only 1 option for attaching it (even if you use a normal fan). There are six screws, 4 to attach the mounting bracket to the fan, and 2 to attach the bracket and fan to the PCI slot cover.

When I attempted to place the PCI slot cover and fan into my system, I realized that it would not fit with my “Sound blaster 2” PCI card installed. It caught the card on multiple locations and there was no way to force it without possibly damaging the card.

installed

Heatsink mounted

Looks standard to me

   So effectively, it turned my Geforce 7800GT from a 2 slot card (using the Titan Water case I reviewed) into a 3 slot card and cooling system. Even if everything else was perfect, this would be completely unacceptable to me. There are MANY coolers on the market that have excellent performance with 2 or even 1 slot systems.

Performance and testing:

  I think the claims that Sytrin make about the noise levels, are greatly exaggerated. While the sensor on the water case is far from exact, going from a normal idle noise level of 27db, to 47db with the KuFormula on high is very noticeable. Now I can hear the email hitting my inbox now. “Why are you running it on the ‘high’ setting if it’s too loud then?” Well once you see the temperatures you might understand.

Results

   If you aren’t a bit surprised by the idle temperature of the “low” setting, then you probably wont agree with me on anything I’ve said up till now. I stopped running the cooler at the “low” setting once it started hitting 60~61 degrees. I was not going to risk my 7800GT just for a review of a VGA cooler. I did the testing of “high” setting before the “low” setting, so I was actually really impressed after the first test. But between the noise and the poor performance at the low setting, that really went away quickly.

Update 6-16-2006:

  Sytrin sent me a few emails about my review of the KuFormula, and they thought something was wrong with my results (Can you imagine if they didn't?). So they sent a 2^nd unit for me to try out and compare to the first.

New on left

No real difference

   Initially I couldn’t really tell if there was anything wrong with the first fan. The temperatures on it’s high setting were more than ok. But low temperatures were way more than out of whack.

   When I got the 2^nd unit out, I put the 2 fan units side by side, and noticed 2 things. The first difference is a small resistor on the fan control unit of the first fan. It looks like it was damaged somehow. The fan still works, and I’m unsure what that resistor actually controls and if it’s only used on the low setting or not but it’s the only visible difference I can see.

New resistor

The problem?