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August 28, 2004 11:04 AM |
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Three-way Cooling Showdown Introduction When it comes to cooling your CPU, it seems that there are almost as many choices available as there are people looking for them. This doesn't make it easy for the average PC user. Today, I'm looking at three different cooling solutions for the CPU. All three can be used on the Socket 462 AMD platform and the Socket 478 Intel platform. Let's take a look at our contenders. Scythe Kamakaze
The Scythe Kamakaze sample used in this article is the version 1 and was provided by QuietPC USA. It runs $34.95.    
The Kamakaze uses a large number of aluminum rods, rather than the typical fins, to disperse the heat generated by your CPU. The fan controller is hard wired to the fan itself, which means that you're pretty much stuck with it. The one thing that really bothers me about using this heatsink with my P4 is the fact that you have to change the mounting bracket on the motherboard to install the Kamakaze. I don't know about you, but I really dislike having to tear my whole rig apart just to install a heatsink! On the plus side, the Kamakaze is quiet, very quiet. Even with the fan set to its highest speed it's quiet. I like quiet, there's enough noise coming from my intake fans as it is without having to put up with a whining CPU fan, too. It's not exactly light at 690g, but it mounts securely and I never felt that it was in any danger of coming loose. Cooler Master Hyper 6
The Cooler Master Hyper 6 sample used in this article was provided by Cooler Master. It retails for $49.99    
The Cooler Master Hyper 6 is huge! That is the first thing I noticed when I saw it. It is not just tall, it is heavy. We're talking 950g of heatsink here! That's roughly two pounds, for those of you that don't want to look it up in a conversion chart. The Hyper 6 comes with a special metal backplate with paperboard insulation that goes on under your CPU socket to keep the Hyper 6 from pulling the CPU right off of your motherboard. If you're thinking of putting this in your LAN box, you will either have to be very careful transporting your rig or come up with a support system of your own to make sure this monster doesn't come crashing down onto your video card. Also, before you run out and drop $50 on this cooler, make sure you've got plenty of room between the side of your case and the CPU socket. How much room? Six inches would be snug, seven or eight inches would be pretty good. You'll also want to make sure you don't have any exceptionally tall capacitors or North Bridge coolers crowding your CPU socket. Don't forget to make sure your PSU is out of the way, too.    
OK, it probably sounds like this beast might be more trouble than it's worth to put into your system. While it does require some planning, it isn't much more work than installing the Kamakaze was. I'll admit to holding my breath while standing my PC back up, hoping that I had tightened everything down correctly so that I wouldn't get my poor 9700 Pro crushed, but I did everything right and nothing was destroyed. The Hyper 6 is amazingly quiet. Of course, being as big as it is and using sic heatpipes, it should be, right? Even at full steam, the fan on the Hyper 6 was hardly audible over the case fans. While Cooler Master doesn't provide a second fan with the Hyper 6, they do allow for one by providing a mounting point on the other side of the fan bracket. I didn't have room to try this, as the PSU was maybe an inch away from the Hyper 6, but a taller case would take care of that. Titan TWC-A04
The Titan TWC-A04 water cooling system was provided by Titan. It sells for $199.  
The Titan TWC-A04 can be installed as an external or internal water cooling solution. To mount it internally, you'll need two adjacent, empty 5.25" bays and plenty or room. To set it up as an external cooling solution, just clear some junk off the top of your case. ;-) The TWC-A04 comes with everything but distilled water, including a GPU block for those of you that want to try water cooling your video card. As this is my first experience with water cooling of any kind, and to keep the testing fair, I only installed the CPU block. The TWC-A04 comes with an impressive looking instruction manual. It turns out that the manual is impressive looking because it contains installation instructions in six different languages. The manual itself is a high quality book with plenty of color pictures of what Titan thinks you should be doing at every step. The instructions leave a bit to be desired, but I managed to get everything installed without any leakage.    
One thing that concerns me with the TWC-A04 is the rate at which I find myself adding water to the reservoir. Because of the unit's compact size, I know the reservoir isn't very large, but I'm adding a couple of ounces of water to it about once a week. If I left my PC on 24/7, I would be adding that amount of water every two or three days. One of the things I like about the TWC-A04 is the included secondary radiator and fan unit. You can set a threshold teperature on the main unit to tell it when to turn on the fan of the secondary radiator. In theory, this is pretty cool. In practice, however, it's more of an annoyance than a help. I ended up just connecting the secondary unit to an open controller on my Vantec Nexus fanbus and turning the fan on at the speed I want it to go instead of depending on the builtin fan controller of the Titan unit. As it turns out, it really doesn't affect the performance very much at all, but it does allow me to regulate the noise much better. Speaking of noise, the Titan TWC-A04 is the loudest cooling solution of the three. This is somewhat mitigated by the fact that you can control all of the fans and make it quiet, but at the cost of some cooling performance.
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