Noise Graphs

To give you a better idea of how noisy each heatsink/fan combination was we ranked them according to this table. A bit too subjective for you? Fine, just skip it then. ;-)

Noise Measuring
0	passive
1	inaudible in open air
2	inaudible in case
3	audible if you pay attention
4	well audible, far from annoying
5	well audible, but not annoying
6	too loud for working (intolerant to noise)
7	too loud for working (tolerant to noise)
8	too loud for gaming
9	too loud for LAN party's
10	headache within minutes

CPU coolers:

AMD S462 test setup:
Testing done by Piotke.

Piotke's Test Setup
CPU	AMD Athlon XP 2400+
Mainboard	Asus A7N8X-E dlx
Cooling	FSP cooler & Boxed cooler & ALX-800

Some pictures of the Socket 462 HSF... (click for bigger picture)










The performance of this cooler is good. Not only is it silent, but it also manages to keep temperatures at plausible levels.

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Intel S478 test setup:
Testing done by JMke.

JMke's Test Setup
CPU	Intel P4 "C" 2.4 Ghz
Mainboard	Asus P4C800
Cooling	FSP cooler & Boxed cooler & Zalman CNPS7000-Cu

Some pictures of the Socket 462 HSF... (click for bigger picture)










Here I got the same remarks as with the S462 cooler. Silent and cool ! The boxed cooler wasn't able to keep the overclocked CPU below shut down temperature, so that's why there's a "0" in the graph.

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PSU testing

Piotke's Test Setup
CPU	AMD Athlon 64 3000+ @ 2.4 Ghz 1.7 Vcore
Mainboard	Shuttle AN50R
Cooling	Thermalright SLK948 U
Memory	2* 256 MB Corsair PC3500 @ 200 Mhz 2-2-2-5
Video	Sapphire Radeon 9800 XT
HDD	Seagate Cuda 5 7200.7 120 Gb
Optical	Nec 2500 A DVD R

After some stressing on a powerful setup, MBM gave me following results:



We can see that both the PSU's seem to have decent voltage rails. The 5 V rail manages to stay always above 5 V and within an acceptable margin (maximum difference of 0.06 volt). It's pretty much the same story the 12V rail. Fluctuations are again within plausible ranges and on both PSU's the average look good. The PSU testing is only short in this article. Why? Well, I included these PSU's in a bigger PSU roundup, which should be finished within a couple of days, so keep an eye out!

On to the conclusion ->>