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August 28, 2004 11:04 AM |
Author: |
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Three-way Cooling Showdown Testing Results Here is the hardware I had installed in my system for testing these three cooling setups. CPU: Intel Pentium 4 2.6C
Motherboard: Albatron PX865PE Pro II
Motherboard BIOS: 1.10
Video Card: ATi Radeon 9700 Pro 128MB
Video Driver: Catalyst 4.7
Hard Drive: WD 80GB ATA 100 7200RPM Caviar Special Edition
DVD ROM Drive: I/O Magic BDV316C 16X
CD-RW Drive: Lite-On 52246S 52x24x52x CD-RW burner
Power Supply: OCZ PowerStream 420W Testing was done in the following manner: Idle Test: I shut down every unnecessary application and service on the PC and let it sit for half an hour before checking the temperatures with Motherboard Monitor 5.3. 
As you can see, all three cooling systems are pretty close when the system is just sitting there. Load Test: I ran Folding@Home, a full system scan using Spybot S&D 1.3, Outlook 2003, four IE 6.0SP2 browser windows, and watched streaming videos simultaneously for 45 minutes before checking the temperature of the CPU with Motherboard Monitor 5.3. 
When the system gets busy, though, the story is completely different! In the battle of the air coolers, bigger is definitely better, as the 4C degree difference between the Kamakaze and the Hyper 6 shows. Either one of these coolers could do a better job with a faster, and consequently louder, fan. However, that would kill one of the selling points for each of them. I was kind of surprised that the TWC-A04 didn't do a better job. Yes, it has the lowest temps in my testing, but only by one degree. Couple that with the fact that it makes more noise, is harder to install, and, if installed externally, makes your system much harder to transport. Not that the Hyper 6 allows for ease of transportation, either. With two pounds plus of copper hanging off of your motherboard with no support for all that weight but the backplate and four screws holding the mounting bracket to it, I would call it precariously attached, at best! I know I did not want to move my PC with the Hyper 6 installed unless absolutely necessary! Even then, I moved it very slowly and carefully.
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