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Silverstone Tundra TD01 External WC Kit Review

Cooling/Water Cooling by piotke @ 2007-11-30

Silverstone introduced a compact external water cooling kit, named the Tundra TD01 a while ago, we stress test this silent cooling solution with a hot running P4 as well as a more eco-friendly Celeron CPU. Does it stand a chance against a high end air cooling setup? We´ll find out.

Test Methodology + results

Test Methodology

Testing the Silverstone was done on an Intel 775 based platform. Tested on 2 different processors and compared with a few other coolers we'll be making a comparison, verifying temperature and noise levels.

Test Setup
CPU	Intel Celeron 420 (1.6/512Kb/800) Intel Pentium 4 560J (3.6/1Mb/800)
Cooling	Silverstone Tundra TD01 Intel Boxed cooler Thermaltake HR01 + 120 mm fan
Mainboard	Asus P5K
Case	Revoltec Zirconium RT-101 ATX Case
Video card	Nvidia Quadro NVS285
Memory	2 * 1024 Mb DDR2 PC7200 EPP OCZ
Other	Seasonic 600 watt WDC 80 Gb Sata

Ambient temperature was measured at ~21°C for all tests, but temp fluctuations, different mounting and user error can account up to 1-2°C of inaccuracy in the 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.

Noise was recorded approximately 60cm away from the front of the system, ambient without any cpu cooler running (thus HDD and PSU; rest was passive) was 38.1 dBA.

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!

Arctic Silver’s ArctiClean was used to clean off thermal paste between tests.

While the Celeron 420 is a very power efficient processor, only 35 watts, it might not be the best choice to test a cooling unit. Although it is the faster cpu in this test, we also decided to test the cooling units with an older Intel Pentium 4 560J. This processor was one of the last Prescott / Netburst processors released, with a very high clock speed. But this also came with a high power usage, 115 watt. Taking a look at the power usage of the entire system, we see the P4 560J equipped system consuming stressed about 100 watt more.

Overall Power Usage

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Test results: Intel Celeron 420

Let's take a look at the performance, beginning with the lower end Celeron 420.

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With the Celeron installed the maximum load temperatures remain fairly low, the Intel stock heatsinks tops out at 32°C which is on par with the higher end Thermalright HR-01 heatsink, the absence of any real difference in the results can be related to the low heat output of the Celeron CPU. The Silverstone TD01 runs hottest in this test.

Below you can find the graphs made with OCCT. During the 30 minutes, the first minute was idle, and then 25 minutes complete stressed, and finally a cool down of 4 minutes, from where we extracted the idle temperature.

OCCT Graph - Silverstone Tundra
OCCT Graph - Intel Boxed
OCCT Graph - HR01 - Low Fan speed
OCCT Graph - HR01 - High Fan speed

Test results: Intel Pentium 560J

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There’s no mistaken this CPU is running hotter, all results are over 70°C, with the HR-01 in the lead, the Silverstone TD01 manages to keep the CPU cooler than the Intel stock cooling this time around.

Also here you can find the graphs made with OCCT.

OCCT Graph - Silverstone Tundra
OCCT Graph - Intel Boxed
OCCT Graph - HR01 - Low Fan speed
OCCT Graph - HR01 - High Fan speed

Pure temperature wise the TD01 doesn’t seem to be such a hot product compared to the Intel stock cooling, but let’s add noise into the mix, we take out our dBA meter on the next page ->

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