Rock me like a Hurricane

The Zerotherm Hurricane is an impressive cooler.  The addition of it on this card all the more so as the cooler sells for around $45 as a stand alone piece online.  So for Inno3D to include high quality cooling and still keep their price competitive is quite a trick. 

Aluminum convection fins are situated to run lengthwise with a plastic shroud fitted atop the works.  This shroud is removable in pieces.  The black plastic air ducting can be removed allowing only the fan to be left which is referenced as "Overclocking" trim in the included installation instructions.  Removal of the fan and the ducting is also an option as "Silent" trim.  I'm not going to go here in our review today as I have yet to find a passive VGA cooling solution that is practical for anything outside of a HTPC arrangement.

On one side of the Hurricane we see four nickel plated heatpipes coming up from the cooler's copper base.  It's nice to see high end features on any cooler especially on a GPU cooling solution. 

Turning the cooler over we get a better view of the thick copper base and the heatpipes.  Look at all that surface area of the convection fins.  Very impressive.  Also notice how the fins allow air flow to blow directly down on to the memory modules of the card once installed.  While I would have liked to see some RAM sinks, having the Hurricane cooler blow direct air on the memory isn't bad.

As you can see in this next pic, the base is adequately smooth.  A true shaver.

Putting it all together

Installing the cooler only took a few minutes and went without incident.  It still felt very odd to be mounting this massive heatpipe GPU cooler while leaving the memory bare.  The layout of the Hurricane cooler does allow for air to be blown directly down on to the memory but I know I would have been happier with it blowing on RAM sinks.  In the second pic below you get an idea of the thickness of the card.  To answer the question, yes, or at least on our test bed the Hurricane cooler blocked off two PCI-E slots due to its size.

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Pg 1 - Introduction
Pg 2 - The Card
Pg 3 - Hurricane Cooler
Pg 4 - Testing / STALKER
Pg 5 - UT3 / Crysis
Pg 6 - Image Quality / Overclocking / Conclusion