Raijintek Morpheus

[testman78]

Introduction

VGA coolers are in my opinion becoming quite niche and almost extinct – particularly when it comes to air VGA coolers. This is because graphics card vendors have come a long way in terms of the cooling solutions they offer – ASUS’ DC2, MSI’s TF2 and EVGA’s ACX to name but a few excellent cooling solutions. As a result it seems almost foolish to spend lots of money, time, effort and voiding your warranty to equip a custom VGA cooler. In terms of water blocks for graphics cards, these are still widespread because water cooling needs water blocks.However, even with that quite gloomy stance on VGA coolers, air VGA coolers still have their place in the market. For example you may have bought a reference design graphics card and you just aren’t happy with the temperatures or acoustics – or you may have bought at custom cooled one that doesn’t cool the VRM and VRAM well enough or is just too big or long. This is where custom reference solutions like the new Raijintek Morpheus come in to play.



Raijintek’s Morpheus is one of the most impressive VGA coolers I have ever laid eyes on to date just on the basis of sheer size. It supports two 120mm fans, has twelve 6mm heat pipes and an extremely large and dense heatsink stack. I’m expecting great things from the Raijintek Morpheus. You can check out the full specifications below.The Morpheus cooler supports a wide variety of NVIDIA and AMD cards using a reference design, encompassing the following models:Radeon HD 7850/7870, R9 270(X), 290(X) [AMD] and GeForce GTX 650 (Ti) / 660 (Ti) / 680 / GTX 760 / 770 / 780 (Ti) [NVIDIA].




Packaging & Contents


The front of the box gives you a picture of this beast, you can see it is targeted at multiple graphics cards.



The back points out some key features which you can read for yourselves if you are interested.



The left side has the cooler's specifications.



The right side has some images of the cooler.



An illustrated installation manual is included in package.The user manual is useful, although RaiJintek often update the guide online, so it is worth checking their website for the latest version.



RaiJintek include a huge array of screws, washers, spacers, adhesive tape, insulation tape and thermal pads.To dissipate the heat, users can install two 120 mm fans for which mounting clips are included.We will look at these in more detail on the installation page.




A Closer Look

In order to keep a balance between high cooling performance and low noise emissions, the Morpheus sports a very large, fully nickel-plated heat sink along with a total of 129 aluminium fins, that can be outfitted with multiple, large fans, subsequently allowing for an effective heat dissipation capacity of up to 360 Watts.



The heatsink weighs about 515 grams without any fans installed.



You can see the sheer size and density of this unit. Twelve 6mm heat pipes and massive heatsink array are sure to give this some potent performance.



Here you can see the heat pipes actually follow an immensely complex path, here’s hoping that all those twists and turns don’t impact on performance.



The heat sink itself is consequently divided into two segments, which are still connected with each other via aluminium fins at the rims for better heat dispersion.



The base is nickel plated just like all the heat pipes are too.



Already at this point, the intricacies of the whole construction begin to show, because, on first glance, the VGA cooler appears to possess only six heat pipes, which traverse through the bottom and are being lead out on both sides. This commonly used construction method is consciously omitted by RaiJintek, since the usage of separate heat pipes is supposed to yield a significantly better heat dissipation result and so all of the twelve heat pipes are mounted head-to-head in six rows.




Installation Process

First, let us take a look at the graphics card i am using as the guinea pig ‘test subject’ today.The Ati R9 290X is one of the best graphics cards on the market, aimed at the high end audience who don’t mind paying a little extra for enhanced cooling and clock speeds.AMD's R9 290X reference design is plagued by high temperatures and fan noise due to the way AMD designed the cooler.Eventually, a majority of the most recent high-end graphics cards from AMD and NVIDIA are being supported, including the current top models GTX 780 (Ti).



Then i added the VRAM heatsinks and VRM heatsinks to the graphics card. This was relatively straightforward.Contained in this set are three types of VRAM coolers, which are to be attached with twin adhesive thermal pads along with a large heat sink ledge for the VRMs of the graphics card.Included with the unit are a total of 24 miniature heatsinks for cooling the memory.



Next up i put the VGA cooler on after applying thermal paste to the base.Despite the considerable length of 25.4 cm, incompatibilities with graphics cards driven by two power connectors won’t arise, since the heat sink does not protrude over the long PCBs of modern day high-end graphics cards.



A true gem is the mounting system of the Morpheus cooler.It comprises two ledges, that are being fastened to the base plate and that provide several mounting screw holes for high compatibility.



Particularly easy is even the cooler’s fan mounting solution, by means of which two 120 mm silent fans can be attached to the heat sink through utilizing the mounting clips that come with the accessory set of each Morpheus SKU.



The absence of any included fans allows for a maximum of freedom in the choices to be made along with the possibility of practically realising configurations between ultra-silent to high-end overclocking.As you can see it occupies lots of space (4 slots).




Test Setup & Methodology

In order to test the efficiency of the VGA cooler i installed this cooler on a reference R9 290X and ran some tests.I gathered idle temperatures by leaving the system on the desktop in an idle state for 15 minutes,I then collect the idle temperature using either GPU-Z or CPUID HW Monitor. For load temperatures i put the Fire Strike Extreme benchmark on for a few runs through and then took the maximum temperature for the period as recorded by my previously mentioned diagnostic programs.Using Fire Strike Extreme is a more realistic way of collecting gaming load temperatures as opposed to FurMark which doesn’t replicate a real-world scenario.



Software used:

-Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit
-CPUID HWMonitor
-GPU-Z
-Fire Strike Extreme

Test system:

-ASUS P8Z77-V
-Intel Core i5 3770K
-32GB Kingston HyperX 1866MHz DDR3
-AMD Radeon R9 290X at stock clocks
-256GB Kingston SSDnow V100
-Antec High Current Gamer 620W
-Cooler Master Test Bench v1.0

I plugged two Noctua NF-F12 industrialPPC-2000 PWM fans into the Raijintek Morpheus.I also plugged two of those fans into the Prolimatech MK-26 cooler.Ι know this cooler will annihilate AMD’s reference cooler, but can it possibly outperform the stunning triple slot Prolimatech MK-26 cooler?



Results-Temperature

Running my cooling tests i saw some absolutely fantastic results.The Raijintek Morpheus out-performed the Prolimatech MK-26 and demolished the stock cooler.




Conclusion

Put simply the Raijintek Morpheus is an outstandingly good VGA cooler.In fact it would tame just about any single GPU on the market quite comfortably without breaking into a sweat and it supports the GTX 780 ti, GTX Titan, HD R9 290X and other powerful single GPU graphics cards that produce a lot of heat.Thanks to the enormous cooling power, fast spinning fan models won’t be needed in order to keep even the hottest graphics-behemoth at a low temperature.This concludes the circle of criteria required for a quiet and at the same time potent cooling solution.Some might argue that not including fans is a bad thing, but with support for 120 mm fans, users can install their fans of choice and won't be paying for fans they might not want to use.Using the right fans, the entire unit should be able to dissipate up to about 360 W of thermal energy.However, the Raijintek Morpheus isn’t perfect.The design is huge and even though this gives it great performance it also blocks SLI and CrossFire X bridges and takes up to 4 slots depending on the fans you use (if you use any at all). This means SLI and CFX are out of the question and you need to triple check whether your other interface cards will fit alongside this cooler.



Raijintek’s Morpheus VGA cooler currently retails for 44.99 British Pounds in the UK.
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HS-011-RT
And let’s face it is a pretty decent price too, sure you need to buy a couple of 120mm fans to go with this which will add another 15-30 British Pounds depending on what fans you choose.Quite simply there is no other (air) VGA cooler on the market (that i know of) that can match this in raw performance or bang-for-buck terms.Of course water cooling would be able to trump it, but custom water cooling blocks cost at least 75 British Pounds a piece and then you need the rest of the loop for that block to actually work.