TennMax Stealth V3 Fighter

There are so many "copycat" products and poorly engineered products on the market these days, it’s really refreshing when you come across a product that stands out both in engineering and uniqueness. The TennMax "Stealth V3 Fighter" Cooler for Voodoo 3 is one such product.

TennMax makes many fine cooling products. Their Lasagna coolers have been Video Chipset cooling leaders for awhile now. Their line of CPU coolers have also always proven to be top performers. I am personally using a TennMax P3 TF Cooler and find it to be about the best P3 cooler on the market right now.

As for the Stealth V3 Fighter, Installation on my Voodoo 3 2000 was a snap. I removed the old stock heatsink, cleaned the surface of the chip and mounted the Stealth V3 Fighter using the unique "push pins". There are two holes in the Voodoo 3 where the stock heatsink was mounted (on the Voodoo 3 3000) and you just insert the pins and push them in to secure. On the V3 2000, the stock heatsink is glued to the chipset and requires a little more luvin’.

The Stealth V3 Fighter comes with TennMax’s phase change thermal interface pad, no thermal compound is needed. This pad is really awesome! It actually bonds itself to the chip as it heats up and has very good thermal transfer. The plastic Chipset on the Voodoo 3 is slightly concave so TennMax recommends putting just a small dab of heatsink compound on the chipset to fill in this gap.

Performance:

As I said, I only have a Voodoo 3 2000 so I wasn’t able to make the quest for 200 MHZ, however, I was totally surprised at what the V3 2000 did once I installed this cooler. Prior to mounting The Stealth V3 Fighter, I had just screwed a 486 Fan to the stock heatsink. I was able to clock the card to about 168 with this combination. Anything higher, it was totally unstable. After mounting the Stealth V3 Fighter, I could clock the card all the way to 180 and have it totally stable! This is out of a Voodoo 3 2000! The system I ran this card in consists of: P3 450 OC to 580 (With a TennMax P3 TF cooler), Abit BX6R2 Rev 2.02 MB, 128 Megs Mushkin G8 Ram, Aopen HX08 Tower case with Extreme case cooling. To test stability, I ran the Quake Massive1, Crusher, and Demo1 in loop mode for 30 or so minutes.

I’m not going to post any benchmarks, you can cruise to any hardware site and find all the benchmarks you want.

Conclusion:

The Stealth V3 Fighter Cooler is another example of the fine engineering that always comes from the people over at TennMax. At only $23.50, this is, without a doubt, a MUST BUY if you own a Voodoo 3 2000, 3000 or 3500. It is one product that is not a clone of another, it stands in a class of it’s own. Thanks TennMax for this and all the other fine products you have given us. I can’t wait for the next new product you bring us.

One more comment. I can’t understand why 3DFX doesn’t ship the Voodoo 3 with the Stealth V3 Fighter Cooler already installed. It would be an awesome addition to the Voodoo 3. It’s time for the Graphics card industry to start thinking about including a high performance cooling solution with their cards to make the product a stand out. Competition is fierce and the first company to do this will be strides ahead of the rest.

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This review and comments are just my personal observations and
opinion. As with any products and services, please research throughly
before making any purchases. The reviewer and overclockers.com shall not
and will not be held liable for any damages cause by products reviewed in
this article.


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