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Thermalright SP-94 Copper Heatpipe Heatsink

Cooling/CPU Cooling by jmke @ 2003-10-05

Thermalright has certainly kept their eye on the ball lately, and they?ve scored yet again with their latest offering, the SP-94. This marks Thermalright?s ingress into heat-pipe technology, and they've made a distinguished entrance. The SP94 is an all copper thin-fin cooler, the embodiment of which centres around their SLK series. From what your about to see, Thermalright has truly raised heat-sink manufacture, to an art form.
We compare it to the SLK-947U and SLK-900U in this article.

Test Results - JMke

Thermalright allowed me to test their latest and greatest Pentium 4 heatsink, and I can only agree with what Liquid3D has told you so far, the finishing is excellent, the installation a breeze and the performance is unreal!

To show you how this heatsink performs in different situations I decided to:

Use a high CFM 80mm fan for the eXtreme people out there.

A low noise 90mm PAPST for those seeking a very silent solution.

Put the heatsink in the best condition according to Thermalright's own guidelines, Horizontal.

Used Arctic Céramique from AS between the CPU and heatsink, renewing it after every test.

I used Hot CPU tester Pro for achieving the highest temperature under load and let it run for a reasonable amount of time while keeping the recorded temperatures in a log-file using MotherBoard Monitor 5.

The system was installed in an open environment (no case), the room temperature was 23°C during testing.

The Test Setup


The SLK900U Installed	The SP-94 Installed

80mm high speed fan	90mm lowspeed fan

JMke's Test Setup
CPU	Pentium 4 "C" 2400Mhz
Mainboard	Asus P4C800
Cooling	Thermalright SLK900U / Thermalright SP-94
Memory	1 * 512Mb PC3700 Corsair
Video	nVidia Quadro MX

At default speeds and voltage the difference between the older SLK900 and the SP-94 is negligible, the sudden drop in temperature on the SLK900U graph is due to a restart of the stress-test program

Madshrimps (c)

The performance is equal at 2.4Ghz when using a low speed fan

Madshrimps (c)

When we up the CPU speed to 3Ghz you can see the SP-94 pull away from its predecessor and gain a temp advantage of 2°C

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Also with the low speed fan there is a 2°C difference, and what's even more impressive is the performance of both products! Using a near silent fan you can overclock your system and still have a low CPU temperature!

And here are all the results put nicely in a table:

End Results Highest Temperature obtained °C
	Thermalright SLK900U	Thermalright SP-94
P4 @ 2400Mhz - 80mm	30	29
P4 @ 3000Mhz - 80mm	33	31
P4 @ 2400Mhz - 90mm	33	33
P4 @ 3000Mhz - 90mm	36	34

As a last test I set the CPU to 2.4Ghz, removed the CPU fan and let the system run like this.. for more than 1 hour! The CPU temperature was only 53°C. If you are looking for a passive cooling solution in a small multimedia desktop PC, don't look any further!

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