 Today we have another VGA cooler from Thermalright. So this is the Shaman or Shaman, depending how you prefer to pronounce it. And this is an 8 heat pipe VGA cooler. It comes in their traditional cardboard box. And let's go ahead and get this guy opened up and find out, well, what it's all about. Okay, so the first thing we're going to find is a little exploded view that's acting as a few different things. So first of all, it seems like it's an instruction guide. Oh no, the instructions are on the back here for how to mount the Shaman. Okay, the example they've used is a GTX 480. You can tell from the PCB cutout for the fan. Although the GTX 480 uses most of the same mounting points as the GTX 580. So you'd have to check the Thermalright site for confirmation. But I would imagine it would also be compatible with the 580 now that that's released. So you can see here are all the officially supported graphics cards. So wow, it goes back as far as the 3850 and then up as current as the 480. And like I said, I suspect that the 580 would also be supported. Okay, here we've got a little contents list. So what we're expecting to find inside. And then the next thing we have is one of Thermalright's 140 millimeter fans. As I mentioned in one of my previous unboxings, I have tried out this fan myself and I do quite like it. So you can be confident in using that fan with your new Shaman that you are having the best experience possible. In terms of a balance between airflow as well as noise. So I went and put away the knife that I had just used to... here it is. Okay, so let's get this opened up here. This is the assembly package. And inside you will find everything we need for assembly. So we're going to find some of these little rubber strips which are for dampening the noise made by the fan. Okay, because this is a performance as well as silence optimized product. So Thermalright's design goal when they're figuring out how to build the best aftermarket VGA coolers, they want to make it quieter and better performance than the OEM cooler. So in order to achieve that, they have to put a lot of thought into it. So these are one of the things that has come out of that particular design objective to reduce the overall noise made by your graphics card. So here's a couple fan clips that you will also need to mount the fan onto the Shaman. All right, we've got some thermal compound CF3 from Thermalright, Chill Factor 3. And then we have one set of mounting hardware. Wow, that keeps it simple, doesn't it? So you've got your non-conductive backing on there. So that's a plastic backing. And then the metal is as I've come to expect from Thermalright, thick, robust and made of steel. So you're not going to have any issues with that backplate flexing on you. Here's a variety of MOSFET as well as RAM coolers. Okay. And let's get a little bit further in here. Wow, this thing looks ridiculous. Actually, that's awesome. All right. Oh, hey, I missed the Thermalright sticker. There it is. That's nice. Okay, so by the time you put a fan on this guy, it's going to be a triple slot cooling solution. So as long as you're aware of that going into it, bear in mind that triple slot isn't as big of a deal now as it used to be. Because there are so many graphic, so many motherboards out there that allow you to have two triple slot cards in SLI or Crossfire. So bear that in mind if you are going to be adding a Shaman to your system shortly. Now, this does use eight heat pipes. And I just love this. Check this out. The maze of heat pipes over here looks outstanding. Here, I want you to get a couple different angles of that because it just looks so cool to have all of those heat pipes just sort of bent around and wrapped around each other. Because, I mean, really, we're talking about fitting all of these precision manufactured so that they all kind of bend in and around each other and they all go to the same base right here. Now, look how big the base is on this compared to a CPU cooler. Also, we'll do the obligatory look how shiny it is. And it does use a convex base. Look how big the base is compared to a CPU. That's because a GPU die is typically quite a bit bigger. So on a CPU, it'd be hard to optimize it to actually make use of eight heat pipes lying side by side because the CPU die is so small and that's where all the heat comes from. Whereas the GPU die, under that huge heat spreader, is able to spread it out a little bit more so we can actually get more cooling performance by spreading it out. So here's our hold down, which you can see Thermalright has thoughtfully provided screws for, which you can actually use to remove the hold down and replace it with something else later when you want to upgrade your graphics card. And then we've got the top here. So these are all soldered down. You can see, like, how low profile it is when I really hold it up this way. And that's what I'll... And here, we'll go ahead and put the fan on it so you can see exactly how thick it is compared to a 100 standard. So this is a 25 mil, 140 milimeter fan, just like that. Check that out again. That looks so cool. Now in terms of performance, I can't really speculate, but I would go ahead and assume because Thermalright designed it that it's gonna pretty much rock anything else. And thank you for checking out my unboxing on the Thermalright Shaman. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips.