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Thermalright ALX-800 vs his big brother SP-97

Cooling/CPU Cooling by piotke @ 2004-05-16

Thermalright has currently one of the best, perhaps even the best heatsink for Socket A. The SP-97. But this heatsink isn?t very budget friendly, so today we?ll take a look at their ALX-800. This heatsink looks a lot like the popular SLK-800, but by using a combination of aluminium and copper fabrication is lower, and so is its price. Does it still perform well though? Let us find out

Testing

Test Setup:

Piotke's Test Setup
CPU	AMD Athlon XP 2400+
Mainboard	Epox 8RDA+
Cooling	ALX-800 & SP-97
Memory	256 MB Corsair PC3500
Video	nVidia Geforce 4 MX480

I stressed the system for about an hour with 2 instances of “Toast”.... temperatures were monitored by using Mother Board Monitor (MBM). Ambient temperature was 21° C, and no case was used. As thermal paste I used the included no-name white stuff.

I used three different 80 mm fans:

Low noise/rpm:

SANYO 80mm 109P0812M701

Airflow: 20.13 CFM

Noise: 21 dBa

Nominal speed: 2000rpm

80x80x15mm

Higher noise/rpm:

Delta 80mm AFB0812SH

Airflow: 46 CFM

Noise: 40dBa

Nominal speed: 4000rpm

80x80x25mm

Super high noise/rpm:

Delta 80mm FFB0812EHE

Airflow: 80.16 CFM

Noise: 52.5 dBa

Nominal speed: 5700rpm

80x80x38mm

As you can see, airflow doubles almost every time.

Madshrimps (c)

By using the 5700 rpm fan, the temperature difference between these two heatsinks is almost negligible. But when we're using lower rpm/CFM fans the difference becomes bigger, and the advantage of the full copper, heat pipe powered SP-97 becomes more apparent, just as we expected. But it's not gigantic, about 4 °C

Time for the conclusion.

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