Installation:

   Installation is very simple for this cooler, and again it comes equipped with everything you'd need to get it up and running. I'd also like to mention the quality of the installation materials Zalman supplies is second to none. No flimsy brackets or cheap screws here.

   The included product manual is also very informative and gives you plenty of pictures on installing process for this cooler on your VGA card. I will try my best to give you the picture steps in real world right now. I'll be removing my Accelero and installing this VF900-Cu onto one of my Nvidia 7800GT's.

1) Remove Old Cooler	2) Clean. Install Ramsinks	3) Retention Pins
4) Thermal Paste	5) Cooler on, Flipped over	6) Tighten
7) Done	Complete	Ramsink Clearance
Ramsink Clearance		Ramsink Clearance

   So that's about it for the installation. One thing that I was missing a little bit for this Zalman VF900-Cu versus my Accelero is the VGA card 2-pin power plug. The Accelero connects directly to the stock 2-pin cooler power plug built into the 7800GT therefore being a cleaner "independant" installation.

   The Zalman VF900-Cu has a longer wire and a 3-pin connection that can be connected to a motherboard 3-pin connection or you can connect it to the Fan Mate 2 that Zalman includes with this and many of it's products for speed control.

Testing:

   I connected to the VF900-Cu directly to a Motherboard 3-pin fan connection to get it going, then attached to the Fan Mate 2 to it to get a sound reading from it....and well, there wasn't any! Even at regular full speed, the VF900-Cu is extremely quiet. So much so that I removed it and ran it at normal speeds for my temp benchmarks.

   You can use the Fan Mate 2 to slow down the fan speeds of the VF900-Cu to dead silent. Of course each user will have to determine what speeds to run it at based on their graphics usage and also their case cooling. To me testing it at 5v dead silent mode is not practical because of that reason. Therefore I only tested it at normal speeds against my other 7800GT with the accelero cooler in SLI.

   Testing was done using 3Dmark06 and Need for Speed: Most Wanted to attain load temperatures. The chassis used for this setup was the HSPC Tech Station V2 as it is open air with dual 120mm fans blowing over the hardware. It's pretty much room temperature and is not hampered by various case cooling issues. Also my overall idle and load temp results may be lower than you achieve with standard case air cooling because of this fact. If you're watercooling, then none of this matters to you...move along ;)