Prolimatech MK-13 VGA Cooler Review - PAGE 1

Most -- if not all -- PC hardware enthusiasts use an aftermarket cooler for their CPU. The cooling performance is night and day going from a stock cooler.

However, replacing the graphics card cooler is far less frequent. This is for two reasons, it seems. First of all, many graphics cards already come with a non-reference cooler that most of the time already performs very well. Those who stick with the reference cooler can definitely get better; the stock coolers from both ATI and NVIDIA are not that great of performers, even if the fan is cranked up to 100%, where it gets very loud.

There are some great products on the market for both air cooling and water cooling, but they all have one main flaw, which is another reason why aftermarket VGA coolers are less frequent: they do not fit all graphics cards. For one, ATI has kept the same mounting hole distance since three generations, which is great when it comes to coolers. NVIDIA has the annoying habit to change it since a few generations, which are released more often than processor sockets. This means when one upgrades his graphics card to the latest series that just came out, the still good VGA cooler must be replaced because it is not made to fit the new hole distance.

Prolimatech, a relatively new company founded in 2008, has just came with a solution to this problem; a universal retention system that is supposed to adjust to all hole distances. The cooler featuring it is the MK-13, which is what we will look at today. Let's take a look at its compatibility table.

Unfortunately, there are many cards missing. This table, coming from Prolimatech's website, has been updated recently; many cards were removed from the list, including the whole NVIDIA Quadro series, the 9800GX2, ATI Radeon HD 5750 and Radeon HD 5770. In fact, on the packaging I recieved, these were listed. Furthermore, under the table's sticker on that packaging was a previous table including cards such as the NVIDIA 8600GT, the ATI X1600 series up to the X1950 Pro and the HD 2400 series up to the HD 2900 series. I was originally going to test the MK-13 on the HD 5770 but I quickly found out that the DVI ports interfere with the cooler's heatpipes.  So although the mounting system is universal, the cooler does not fit on all cards.

So, can the MK-13 still reflect the professionalism and experience of Prolimatech's engineers despite this shortened-over-time compatibility list? Will it live to the hype of their previous masterpiece, the Mega Shadow CPU cooler? First step to find out is to unbox it.