XSReviews

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Introduction

Jetart have been making enthusiast products for your PC for awhile now. I personally have never seen any of their products in the shops. This product is aimed at cooling your GFX card and Northbridge whilst looking good at the same time.

About Jetart

Jetart Technology has been established since 1989. Jetart is not only a cooling devices designer but also a very professional & well-organized manufacturer, as well as an exporter. We now are focusing on developing ” Thermal Solution ” relating products. All of materials applied and production procedures are under very strict control. Our capacity has come up to 12 millions pieces per year. In the mean time, we create a brand name “Jetart ” for all of our cooling products. Our goal to achieve is that “Jetart ” represents image of innovation & good quality.

Our main business beliefs are Innovation & Quality Control . Customers’ needs always come to the first priority concern. New products are designed and developed to meet with customers & market requirements

Specs

Here are the specifications taken from the Jetart site:

The 3D Cooler

I’ve never seen anything like this before. Most of the PCI coolers that I have seen, like the Vantec Spectrum Fan Card, are ‘2D’ in the sense that they only cool on one plane. This has the big downside that only one side of the card is cooled. This side is usually the side with the GPU on and the air is usually forced directly downwards on to it. The 3D cooler is so called because you can set it up to blow on a maximum of 3 planes, one of these planes is directly across your GFX card. This means that all of your cards components are cooled effectively. Also, there will be collateral cooling on your Northbridge or any other components nearby.

Well, that’s the theory anyway, lets see if it really works.

Packaging

The box is a simple slide out vacuum formed affair. I picked it up and expected the cardboard back to slide out easily, but Jetart have decided that it’s necessary to stealth staple the packaging together.

I have to say that the packaging does the job of keeping the product pieces together and that’s it. The graphics aren’t particularly attractive. This product wouldn’t be able to sell its self if you saw it in a shop. But never judge a book by its cover…

The manual is pretty much the 4 pictures and 6 poorly translated points printed on the package back. For example; ‘5. Connecting the power connectors of fans to system’s power supply afterward the selecting fans’ power wires plug into one enclose 1 to 3 pin adapter.’ My advice would be to put it together using your own common sense, you can’t really go round with this.

Other than this, the back of the box tells you all of the pack’s contents, the company logo, which strangly is ‘HICOOL’ rather than Jetart, and an in-use photo.

All the bits and pieces necessary for the construction of the cooler were in there and they even include a couple of cable ties for wire management. I personally would need more than 2 but this shows a high level of thought that went into this product.

The actual frame that the cooler comes with has a great finish. Both sides sport a very dark navy blue finish. The rear of the plates is not glossy like the front, but it doesn’t need to be as you don’t see this side as it normally has the fan on it. The brackets also sport a 70 x 15mm sticker saying 3D slot fan. Personally I think that these look tacky and they were pealing off anyway, so I just finished the job. I don’t know why Jetart decided that these were necessary, as they cost money and don’t really add anything to the overall product.

You get 2 extra brackets with the cooler, and you can put these on the edges of the main bracket. The mounting options are infinite as it’s not screw holes, but a slot that you screw to. All this means that you can point the airflow where it’s needed most, which – more often than not – is the GPU.

Installation

The product comes flat-packed; Ikea style. However, much unlike Ikea, all the pieces are there and crafting together this cooler is a breeze.

The brackets that you get have 4 mounting holes where you attach the 70mm fans and the grills. The picture below shows the difference between an 80mm grill (left) and the supplied 70mm grills (right).

The fans spin at 3500rpm and are surprisingly thin at only 15mm. However, being so thin, the fan blade pitch is lower meaning higher noise to CFM ratio. They run at 27.9 CFM and just below 30 dB, meaning a total of 83 CFM, these fans definitely pump out a fair old breeze. This isn’t horrendous, but when you compare it to an Akasa 120mm fan running at 1400RPM, 44.8 CFM and 18 dB you see a big difference. Akasa has 2.5 CFM per dB, whereas these fans have about 1 CFM per dB. Obviously this is going to be the case but worth pointing out all the same. The reason why these fans are so thin is to cut down the number of compatibility problems with people’s cases. If the fans were standard size then they would not be able to fit into the spaces where they are needed.

The fans themselves sport the Jetart logo on the front, whether or not they were made by Jetart is another matter. They connect to a molex cable with 3 female fan leads coming of it. A fan sensing lead comes off each fan but they are quite pointless if you use the provided connector. It might be of more use to someone who has a fan controller.

The fans have 4 LED’s in the outer casing that are blue and green, contrary to what the publicity picture at the start of this review shows. The LED’s give the product a good look when they are turned on and provide a nice aura to your case; important for people with window cases. The wires that connect these LED’s to the fans power are covered by a rather ugly looking blue opaque piece of tape.

My main gripe with this tape is that it covers up the usual inscribed airflow direction indicator. This means that the user has to hook them up to their rig to see which way they are pushing air before assembly can begin. This becomes more annoying when you realise how difficult it is to get the screws for these fans in. The glossy blue finish is put on after the screw holes are tapped being that the screw threads are filled with the paint. I couldn’t screw in the screws first time with a hand screwdriver; instead I had to whip out my trusty Bosch PSR 120 to do the job. Even with this I struggled. However, once the screw threads are cleared, installation is a breeze. It annoys me thought that all Jetart have to do is rearrange their production method, i.e. to paint, and then tap the screw holes. Although it didn’t stop my installation, it might for people who do not have access to a power screwdriver.

I decided that the best way to mount the fans was to have one at the end of the card blowing directly along it to the back of the case, and the other two blowing full pelt at the GPU.

On my graphics card, which granted is only a Radeon 9200 256mb, the GPU is more or less directly in the middle of the card. Obviously this is where I want the most airflow. Unfortunately, the 3D cooler does not allow you to have a fan mounted in the middle and another one on the bottom; i.e. I would only be able to have 27 CPM directly at the GPU, or 54 CFM pointed in its general direction. This annoyed me again, but I could always use the other bracket and have air running at the HS in a different direction.

Whilst installing the brackets, I realised how fragile they were and I could bend them quite easily; especially where they thin around the fan holes. All that is need to stop this is some bending that would increase their strength greatly. However, strength is not a great problem once the fans are installed.

Once I had installed the fans and the brackets, putting them into the computer was easy. There are small clips on the bottom of the main bracket that hug a spare PCI slot and then the usual backing plate screw is used to hold it all secure. By using a system that holds on using a PCI slot, the effective time span that this product can be used in is reduced. Your run-of-the-mill PCI slots are slowly being ousted in favour of the faster PCI-e version that this product would simply not work with.

Testing

I aimed to make this a replacement for a Coolermaster Neon blue fan on top of a Powerball packaging insert… surely it could do better?

I can’t give any reading as the ways in which you can use this product are so varied. However I could get an extra couple of Mhz out of my aged 9200 which was cool. And yes, it was better than my other ‘solution’ .

The noise that this unit made was annoying even to my ears that have been subjected to the hell of a Coolermaster Aero fan on maximum. I would definitely say that a fan controller is needed with this set up.

I doubt there was a huge drop in temperature of any of the components that this unit cooled, as all it really does is circulate already hot air rather than bring in air from outside the case, or exhaust air. However, there must have been some difference in temperature if I was able to get a higher overclock. But then again, my GPU has a passive heatsink so any extra airflow is going to cause a massive difference.

Before I finished testing, I decided to change the layout of the fans. This layout had air blowing from each axis, and made me get a single extra MHz out of my GPU. Not great, but worth pointing out.

I also have to wonder about its usefulness as a product as a whole. With the latest generation of graphics being released we now see them sporting huge heatsinks incorporating heatpipes and powerful fans, for example the GeForce 7800 GTX. These cooling solutions exhaust straight out the back of the case, and have a heatsink with plastic covering over the whole thing. This means that any extra airflow pointed at this will only provide extra noise, rather than additional cooling performance.

However, if you have a case with no air flow for example shop-bought pre-made PC’s, then this product will make a large impact. In fact, I tested this as my gaming PC was down for awhile. It did indeed allow me to get a considerable gain in overclockability (is that a word?). But, most hardcore gamers would stay away from such a computer.

Here are a couple of shots of the cooler in action. The blue-green colour fitted well with my case colour scheme.

I hope you don’t like neat cable management…

Conclusion

With all that in mind, I’ve decided that this product is aimed mainly at budget cards owners which people feel the need to overclock excessively. In all honestly, the $25 asking price is not worth getting an extra couple of FPS. In all fairness though, the 3D slot fan does a much better job than the equivalent coolers already occupying this niche. It seems to me, to be a product that allows the mounting of extra fans merely for the sake of it; running on the assumption that more fans will definitely mean lower temperatures.

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Pros	Cons
Provides extra GFX card cooling	Expensive for the performance gains
Easy(ish) installation	Screw holes tight
Goog finish	Limited usage
Great look when LED’s are in action	Usable for budget card owners only
	Noisy
	Cable management issues

3/10

PRICE: $25 -> £20

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