Introduction
Having trouble squeezing those last few mhz out of your video card? Got a windowed case with some
cool CCFL’s making the innards glow but still feel like something is missing? Vantec may have
exactly what your looking for, to solve both of these dilemmas…the iCEBERQ 4.
Most of you have at least heard of Vantec. Their Stealth and Tornado
case fans have become somewhat legendary albeit for completely opposite reasons.
The Stealth for being all but completely silent while still pushing a decent
amount of air compared to other quiet fans. The Tornado on the other hand,
pushes an insane amount of air but with just a few of them in your rig can
quickly lead to vacuum cleaner sound levels. Vantec also has lines of CPU coolers,
memory DIMM coolers, even laptop coolers, and soon they will have their very own line
of computer cases.
Today, however we’re going to take a look at Vantec’s iCEBERQ 4 GPU cooler. The heat sink
itself is made entirely from copper so it should be a step up from the
stock cooler that came on your card and with it’s two cool-blue LED’s located within
the fan mechanism it should put a sweet-ass glow down by your PCI cards.
Here are the specs off Vantec’s web site as well as the back of the retail
package…
| Product: | iCEBERQ4 Premium VGA Cooling Kit |
| Manufacturer: | Vantec |
| Model: | CCB-A4C |
| Voltage: | DC 12V |
| Power: | 1.45 W |
| Fan Speed: | 6000 R.P.M |
| Airflow: | 5.9 CFM |
| Fan Bearing: | Ball Bearing |
| Dimensions: | Cooler: 75 x 62 x 15mm Heatsink : 20 x 20 x 6mm (4 pcs) Thermal Tape : 18 x 18mm (4 pcs) |
Overview
We’ll start off with the packaging. The box was nice enough…
The window in the front gives you a sneek peak at the slick looks of the cooler inside. The
contents of the package are listed on the side…
This seems simple but it’s pretty handy if you happen to be buying this
product from a retail store such as Comp USA or Fry’s. Sometimes a plain-jane
word list doesn’t give you a clear idea of what your actually getting. In
the pic below you can see that the plastic molding in the box keeps all the
accessories separate and safe.
Below I have removed everything from the plastic molding to show you all the individual components…
In the top left hand of the picture you can see the 3 to 4 pin converter
in case you don’t have any open fan headers on your motherboard.
In the middle is the cooler itself with the included Vantec brand thermal paste just beneath
it. On the bottom we have the four memory chip heat sinks, and in the plastic bag are four
push-pins used to secure the cooler to the card. You’ll actually only need two of
these but little plastic things tend to break easily so it’s nice to see that Vantec has you
covered. Also in the bag are four pieces of thermal tape that you can use to adhere the four
memory heat sinks. This brings me to one of my few gripes about this product, well actually
just the accessories, and that is that most cards have 8 memory chips. Keep in mind though that
this is a small
complaint because mainly when you buy this thing your not buying it for the memory heat sinks,
your buying it for the GPU cooler.
Lastly we have the super-detailed instructions that show you how to install the cooler… sort of.
To be fair there really isn’t a whole lot to installing this thing so the
fact that these directions are of little to no help really doesn’t matter
as long as you exercise caution and use some common sense.
Installation
Here’s what we are starting out with today. Don’t mind the odd colors on the card, the guy who I
bought this from thought it would be neat to paint this thing like a friggin’ clown. The cooler
that’s on it here is actually a BFG cooler and not the stock cooler that comes with the card. I think
though, that this is merely a stock cooler off a different card so it’s nothing fantastic at any rate.
One awesome thing I noticed almost
immediately after taking the iCEBERQ 4 out of it’s package was the mirror-like finish on the contact
side…
The smoother the finish on your heat sink the better the contact between
it and the GPU, which of course translates into better heat dissipation. I used the thermal tape
that was included to adhere the 4 memory heat sinks…
Once all four were attached it looked pretty damn good, too bad there weren’t four for the other side…
Next I installed the GPU cooler itself and I thought I was S.O.L., check out the pic below to see what
I mean…
As you can see the cooler hangs over the gold AGP connectors which would obviously prevent me from properly
installing the card. Duh, it turns out you have to install it with the words facing the other way. So
once I had it turned around, and I used some of the old memory heatsinks I had for the other chips I was
left with this…
Once it was installed I got to see the blue LED’s light up the PCI card area as shown below…
Testing and Conclusion
The test setup is as follows…
- P4 2.4c stock clock
- Abit IC7 motherboard
- Sapphire ATI 9600XT
- Corsair PC3200 XMS RAM
- Chieftec Dragon style case
- 2x intake 80mm
- 2x exhaust 80mm
- 1x 90mm fan on Zalman PCI bracket
To test I used a Computer Nurse CPU Thermometer model number ETM-2006. I
placed the sensor on the back of the card directly opposite where the GPU
sits on the other side. I started by testing the stock cooler that I already
had in place. To test I let 3DMark03, a graphics benchmarking suite, loop for an hour.
This pushes the graphics card pretty much as far as it will go and therefore gets the
temps as high as possible. The ambient temp in the case was 27 degrees Celsius, I tried
to maintain the room temp throughout testing so that the case temp wouldn’t change too much.
As you can see the iCEBERQ cooler has lower temps all around. The difference of course is most
important when looking at the overclocking potential because I’m guessing most of you out
there who would even bother to upgrade your
video card’s cooling are doing it to get a better OC. This leads directly to the next area of
interest which of course would be the overclocking results. I used a program called ATI Tool to
overclock the card and 3DMark03 to test for stability.
As indicated in the above chart, the iCEBERQ 4 allows for an extra 17mhz on the core and 4mhz on
the memory. The core advantage is decent for such a minor upgrade and though the added memory performance
is close to negligible I really wasn’t expecting much. Mainly the reason for my low memory expectations is
that although I changed four of the memory heat sinks the other four were the same ones I started out with.
Conclusion
Pro’s:
- Cool Blue LED’s
- Quality construction
- Excellent Mirror-like finish
- Cools like it should
Con’s:
- Only 4 heat sinks
- Cheesy unhelpful instructions.
Overall I was very pleased with Vantec’s iCEBERQ 4. Besides the shortage on memory heatsinks, and the
useless instruction sheet everything was great. Anyone looking to upgrade their graphics card’s cooling
solution for a fair price would probably be hard pressed to find something better. If you want, you can
check out Vantec’s Website or SVC
where this unit was purchased.
| Store Rating | Store Name | Price | Visit Store |
|---|---|---|---|---|
   190 Store Reviews |  Kmart | $ 649.99 | 
| |
116 Store Reviews |  OfficeMax | $ 649.99 |
| |
226 Store Reviews |  Amazon Marketplace | $ 624.50 |
| |
4564 Store Reviews |  Buy.com | $ 666.99 |
| |
4238 Store Reviews |  J&R Music and Computer World | $ 649.99 |
|
