AMD Athlon 64 heatsink roundup summer 2005

Cooling/CPU Cooling by piotke @ 2005-09-03

The new school year is about to begin, and every student will feel the urge to buy a lot of things, because "I need it for schoolwork".
How about using this excuse to buy new CPU cooling ? This article should give you a little help in the right direction.

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Intro & test setup

Intro

The summer is coming to an end soon, yet the weather remains hot in Belgium lately. At the time of this writing it's ~30 °C in my room. I'm glad I tested the coolers a couple of days earlier. Once again your CPU is suffering from the heat. Perhaps a new cooler? We have a collection of 4 latest A64 Coolers, presenting to you "The A64 Cooler Roundup Summer 2005".

It might not beat or even match JMke's earlier A64 cooler roundup; tried as hard as I could this review has some new coolers that might get your attention.

I'll go directly to the point. First a description of the test setup and methodology, then an overview and separate description of the coolers, testing and conclusion. No time to lose, I don't want to keep the student readers away too long from their home work ;-)


Test setup & Methodology :


Piotke's Test Setup
CPUAMD sempron 2600+
Cooling
  • Boxed cooler
  • Coolermaster Hyper 6+
  • Speeze EE782B3 CopperReef
  • Scythe Katana
  • asetek VapoChill Micro Series
  • MainboardAlbatron K8 Ultra-U Pro
    VGAAlbatron MX480
    Memory2*512 Mb A-Data Vitesta DDR600
    PSUAntec TrueControl 550 Watt


    Of course, I don't use my system on default clockspeeds. I added an extra 400 mhz to the cpu:

    Madshrimps (c)


    The Sempron 2600+ @ 2000 Mhz and 1.6 vcore is putting out close to 100 Watt according to this online calculator.

  • All results were taken with room temperature at ~27°C. Due to room temp fluctuations, different mounting and user error can account up to 1-2°C of inaccuracy from obtained results. Please keep this in mind when looking at the results. Each heatsink was tested repeatedly; if I got questionable results the test was restarted.
  • Setup was installed in a case less environment
  • Noise level of each fan was recorded with SmartSensor SL4001A. The sensor was placed ~65cm away from the HSF. The lowest dBA reading in the test room was ~32 dBA.
  • System was stressed by running K7 CPU Burn for 30min (after Thermal Compound’s burn-in); this application pushes the temperature higher then any other application or game we’ve yet encountered. Speedfan was used to log maximum obtained temperatures.
  • Arctic Silver kindly send us their “Lumière” thermal testing compound which has the same colour as Ceramique, requiring a mere 30-minute of break-in time!

    Time for the first contestant, here comes Coolermaster ! >>>


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