Intel CPU Heatsink S775 Roundup June 2006

Cooling/CPU Cooling by piotke @ 2006-06-20

We compare nine different Intel socket 775 heatsinks from Thermalright, Zalman, Titan, Scythe, GlobalWin and Thermaltake in our latest roundup. Can they prevent a Pentium 4 Prescott from melting without ruining our ears? Let?s find out.

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Introduction & Test Setup

Introduction

Our focus at Madshrimps the past year has been on heatsinks which were mainly compatible with AMD’s S939 (if they had S775 compatibility, it’s was a nice bonus, but nothing more), and with good reason, as this is (was?) the most widely used enthusiast platform. With the release of a new AMD socket (and mounting bracket) and an upcoming new contender from Intel there might be a shift to the Blue Camp.

The Intel Core 2 (previously known as Conroe) Duo/Extreme will come in LGA775 flavor, at the moment only two motherboards offer support for the new core, the Intel i975X “bad axe” rev304 reference motherboard and the MSI 975X rev 2b. It also means the mounting method for the air cooled heatsinks will remain unchanged compared to Pentium 4 CPUs.

And so we venture into the S775 realm for heatsinks for the first time since January 2005. In today’s roundup I’ve focused on S775 only heatsinks, this includes special versions of heatsinks we tested in the past on S939, but exclude most heatsinks which offer multi-platform compatibility.

Madshrimps (c)


What we have in store for you:

  • Thermaltake Jungle 512
  • Thermaltake Silent 775
  • Scythe Katana 775
  • Titan TTC-NH01TB/932/PW
  • Titan TTC-NK34TB
  • DataCooler DC-775B932Z/PW
  • GlobalWin GP94NPHH
  • Zalman CNPS9500 AT
  • Thermalright HR-01 775

    Rather than trying to reinvent the wheel, I’ve build a setup similar to one used by my colleague JMke for his AMD S939 tests, obviously I needed an Intel motherboard and CPU.

    Test Setups and Methodology

    Piotke’s P4 S775 Test Setup
    CPU Intel Pentium 4 530 3Ghz S775
    Mainboard Asus P5ND2 SLI
    Memory 2 * 512Mb OCZ DDR2
    Other
  • XFX 7600 GT
  • A.C. Ryan RyanPower2 450W PSU
  • Nec DVD writer
  • 3x Seagate 200Gb SATA
  • 1x Maxtor 80Gb SATA
  • Belkin wifi card


  • in-take temperature was measured at 23°C for all tests, but temp fluctuations, different mounting and user error can account up to 1-3°C of inaccuracy in the obtained results. Please keep this in mind when looking at the results. Each heatsink was tested repeatedly; if we got questionable results the test was restarted.
  • Noise level of each HSF combo was recorded with SmartSensor SL4001A, the sensor was placed ~50cm away from the case. The lowest dBA reading in the test room was 36.7dBA with everything turned off, when the system was turned on without active CPU cooling the ambient noise rose to 37.8dBA.
  • System was stressed by running two instances of 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 color as Ceramique, but only a break in time of 30min!

    The Case

    Madshrimps (c)
    Photo from our review here


    I used a Sunbeamtech Silent Storm with one 120mm in the rear, a Scythe S-FLEX SFF21D @ 12v ~844rpm silent fan and one in-take fan from Sunbeamtech rated at 1000rpm at 12v (without the in-take fan the 4 hard drives would overheat quickly).

    Noise was recorded approx. 50cm away from the case at an angle, here’s a (very bad) drawing of how the dBA meter was positioned opposite the case and the test-room.

    Madshrimps (c)


    What was measured?

  • The CPU temperature was measured with SpeedFan and highest value recorded
  • Temperature of air coming into to the case at the front

    Let's get started with our first contestant ->
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