Test Setup & Methodology

JNav89GT's Intel S775 Test Setup
CPU	Intel P4 530 Retail-3.0GHz LGA 775
Mainboard	Albatron PX865PE7 Pro
Memory	Mushkin PC3200 Level II V2 1024/2x512mb
Video	ATI Radeon X700Pro
Power Supply	Fortron 520W ATX
Operating System	Windows XP SP2

CPU temperatures were measured after 30 minutes of running 2 instances of CPU Burn. Idle temperatures were taken while allowing the system to "rest" without any activity for 10 minutes after booting.

For system testing I choose to include the Video card/GPU block during assembly to allow any resistance of this block towards the water pumps effectiveness to become a factor. I chose NOT to mount this block to the video card though because I wanted to isolate the cooling ability of this system with just the CPU being cooled. What this test represents is worst case scenario given equal ambient temps and just the CPU block mounted. If the video card block was mounted, there would undoubtedly be added heat into the loop and overall temperatures could suffer.


Results



As seen above, the WC202 did a fairly good job of cooling the CPU at load. The idle temps were not quite as good as some of the better air coolers though. I think we could debate all day whether it is more beneficial to have better idle or load temperatures, but I'd take the better load temperatures over better idle temperatures myself. What this data doesn't tell you is no matter how hard I tried, I could not successfully overclock much past this point. Previously, I have run this CPU at 3.75-3.825GHz depending on which air cooler I was running. The WC-202 was unable to boot to windows at 3.75GHz and I suspect the heat removing capacity of the unit was just overwhelmed. Provided I kept the CPU at or below 3.6GHz the system performed well and ran fairly cool in comparison to air-cooled heatsinks.


So what does it all mean? >>>