Cooler Master Blue Ice Northbridge Chipset Cooler Review

Cooling/VGA & Other Cooling by piotke @ 2005-08-19

When I recently bought my nForce4 based mainboard, I immediately got irritated by the whining sound produced by the chipsets cooler. But Coolermaster has a solution; Blue Ice is the code name! Today I?ll be testing this fancy cooler.

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Intro & installation

Introduction

When it comes to specifications, this cooler has everything to become a monster hit. Heatpipes combined with a copper base and large fins. Add a blue ledded fan to that and you might have a killer combination. Hence the might part in the previous sentence ...

The NVIDIA nForce 4 is a very popular chipset for both AMD and Intel computers. But it becomes hot. And one of the things on the manufacturers website caught my attention. Coolermaster states the following:
Large - Might not fit all motherboards (including many nForce4 boards)

But I accepted the challenge to test the RT-UCL-L4U1 / Coolermaster Blue Ice on my main board, the Asus A8N SLI, based on the Nforce4 SLI chipset. Let's take first a closer look to the specifications and packaging.

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Besides a short, but to the point manual, a bag of thermal paste, and all the needed parts for installation on different platforms, the full specifications are:

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Madshrimps (c)The fan might look small and noisy, but surprisingly it was very silent. Operating at 1000 rpm less (4500 rpm versus 5500 rpm), there's a whole world of sound difference ... But does this have its impact on the performance? Carry on reading!


Time for a little photo shoot....

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Installation


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Coolermaster has thought of everything. The unit can be installed on really every chipset. So where's the problem? The big size and especially the height of the cooler and combined with new high end video cards simply doesn’t match.

A fellow reviewer wanted to install this cooler on his Epox EP 9NPA+ SLI main board; and it didn’t fit. After some turning and repositioning, I found the best position to install my VGA card. But I can assure you, it takes quite some puzzling.



Before and after
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Time for the testing >>>
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