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CPU Heatsink Roundup April 2007

Cooling/CPU Cooling by jmke @ 2007-04-14

We continue our testing of the latest CPU heatsinks on our reference system, this time new contestants from Coolermaster and Scythe enter the fray. Whether you’re looking for extreme silence or extreme performance, this roundup will help you decide.

Introduction & Test Setup

Introduction
We continue our heatsink tested with the addition of four brand new contenders from coming from Coolermaster and Scythe, as well as retest the popular Tuniq Tower 120. To accommodate the target audience of some of the new heatsinks they were tested with silent as well as high performance fans, if you’re looking for extreme cooling by use of conventional air cooling, you’ve come to the right article!

Heatsinks Compared

These heatsinks were previously tested on the Intel S775 setup:

Madshrimps (c)

Intel Reference S775 Heatsink

Coolermaster Eclipse

Coolermaster Mars

Coolermaster Hyper TX

Scythe Ninja

Titan Amanda TEC

TTIC BIG

Zalman CNPS9700LED

5 heatsinks are now added to the comparison:

Madshrimps (c)

From left to right:

Coolermaster GeminII

Scythe ANDY Samurai Master

Scythe Kama Cross

Scythe Katana 2

Tuniq Tower 120

S775 Test Setup and Methodology

We build a new S775 system with new parts from Alternate.de, the CPU is one hot running Pentium 4 524, 3.06Ghz. It is mounted on a Swiss-army knife equivalent of motherboards: an Asrock 775Dual-VSTA.

The mounting system on S775 is quite straight forward and well thought out, 4 holes around the socket serve as mounting points for the push pins on the standard Intel cooler. Installation is a snap, and removal is very easy too.

Madshrimps (c)

With the stock cooling and at stock voltage the 3Ghz P4 was running stable at 3.68Ghz, quite a nice improvement from default speeds.

A Watt Meter recorded peak power consumption under heavy CPU load at 138W, which is less than our previous Athlon 64 setup which consumed up to 165W. The Asrock bios lacks CPU voltage manipulation, so at default voltage is seems this Prescott setup is more power friendly then the over-volted AMD system.

We’re re-using the case, power supply and VGA card from our previous Athlon 64 test setup to complete the S775 system:

Intel S775 Setup
CPU	Pentium 4 524 @ 3628Mhz - 1.36v vcore
Mainboard	Asrock 775Dual-VSTA
Memory	1 * 512Mb Mushkin PC3200 LVLII V2
Other	Antec Sonata II with AcoustiFan DustPROOF 120mm @ 5v in the rear as outtake (mounted with soft-mounts) ATI R9000 Passive Cooling Silverstone EFN-300 300W Passive Cooled PSU Seagate 7200.8 200Gb HDD in Scythe Quiet Drive

in-take temperature was measured at 22°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.

Madshrimps (c)

dBA meter is placed right at the edge of the case - with side panel removed

Noise level of each HSF combo was recorded with SmartSensor SL4001A, the sensor was placed ~5cm away from the side of the case with panel removed. The lowest dBA reading in the test room was 37.8dBAwith system running without HSF fan.

System was stressed by running K7 CPU Burn for 30min (after Thermal Compound's burn-in); this application pushes the temperature higher than 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, but only a break in time of 30min!

Arctic Silver's ArctiClean was used to clean off thermal paste of the CPU and heatsink between tests

Fans used for comparison

To eliminate as much variables in the tests we test each heatsink with a "reference" fan if it can be mounted.

GlobalWin NCB 120x120x25mm fan with 41.7CFM rating.

Onto our first new contestant ->

Comment from Rutar @ 2007/04/14

I hear the Darth Vader theme everytime I see the Gemini altough the results are quite a dissapointment =O

So it's time you get the dual 140 heatsink from Thermalright.

Comment from jmke @ 2007/04/14

why do you find the results for the GeminII a disappointment?

Comment from Rutar @ 2007/04/14

Quote:

Originally Posted by jmke

why do you find the results for the GeminII a disappointment?

It is barely able to beat the Tuniq and the Ninia when using the second best fan on the market for noise performance. If you use 2 120s on the Ninia it will most likely annihilate it.

Hence, I assume that the fin or heatpipe design is flawed so Thermalright needs some better engineers as they simply are outclassed by Scythe and Tuniq.

Have they lost anyone in the past year so we have a Oskar Wu situation?

Can you get ahold of a pair of Silent Eagles? I'm sure Sharkoon would like their product to appear in more reviews, as it deserves it for being the best fan on the market.

Comment from jmke @ 2007/04/14

GeminII is Coolermaster fyi

it's build for high performance, so logically, that it will fall behind when used with slower CFM fans; the design is not meant for this.
Coolermaster has another new Tower heatsink coming with 120mm support which will maybe challenge the Ninja and others alike

Sharkoon fan-wise, I'm testing with the amount of fans standard provided, I started with the NCB, need to continue with that one, otherwise I can start from scratch

Comment from Rutar @ 2007/04/14

oops

The age of Tornados and Deltas is over since the XP-120 came out so it is pretty much pointless to optimize it for noisy fans, especially since the Tower heatsinks max out a CPU already if you use those noisy fans.

Comment from jmke @ 2007/04/14

the idea behind the GeminII was to cool mosfets, chipsets, ram too, so I heard

Comment from Church of Noise @ 2007/04/17

Is there a possibility to test the Thermalright Ultra 120 (extreme or normal version) in the near future?
These seem to beat the Tuniq Tower and be very very silent (up to the point where one could use one without a fan on a non-oc'd E6600).

Just an idea of course

Comment from jmke @ 2007/04/18

I tested it here: http://www.madshrimps.be/?action=getarticle&articID=496 while I'm sure it performs lovely with high speed fans, at low CFM the Ultra doesn't shine

Comment from Rutar @ 2007/04/18

Quote:

Originally Posted by Church of Noise

If you like passive cooling, the Ninja is optimized for low speed fans or passive use with large fin spacing.

that's the benefit of the test setup used by madshrimps, it uses fans that would be considered quiet by the majority of users and that is what most people want today

Comment from Spanki @ 2007/05/10

Hey jmke,

First off, great job on the fan and heatsink reviews. Since you've had first-hand experience with them, I'm curious what your take is on why the CM Hyper Tx does so well, compared to say the Scythe Katana 2?

It looks like they both use a ~42 cfm fan / 3 heat-pipes and the Scythe appears to have more fins, which have more contact with each fin (oval slot, due to slanting vs round slot). I guess I was thinking that the Scyth would do better.

You think the difference is in the higher impedence of the Scythe? The way the heat-pipes are mounted at the base (the Tx seems better in that regard)?

I guess I'm just surprised at the Hyper Tx performance I'm seeing in reviews - a light-weight cooler, with push-pin mounting that out-performs all kinds of HSFs you wouldn't expect it to (maybe a bit loud at full load? but that's ok when there's a lot of gunfire and explosions going off

Comment from Spanki @ 2007/05/10

Quote:

Originally Posted by jmke

Coolermaster has another new Tower heatsink coming with 120mm support which will maybe challenge the Ninja and others alike

Oooh... do tell!

. Show us a pic - we won't tell.

Comment from jmke @ 2007/05/10

Quote:

Originally Posted by Spanki

I guess I'm just surprised at the Hyper Tx performance I'm seeing in reviews - a light-weight cooler, with push-pin mounting that out-performs all kinds of HSFs you wouldn't expect it to .

like the Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 (Pro) did then?

can't put my finger on the exact reason why they do so good, but combination of custom fan which sends airflow over every part of the heatsink with help of a shroud at the top to further help cool things down certainly seems to off.

The new coolermaster 2*12 we saw at Cebit

more pics here: http://www.madshrimps.be/?action=get...&articID=5 50

Comment from Rutar @ 2007/05/10

Are those 38mm fans for more pressure?

Comment from Spanki @ 2007/05/10

Thanks, I must have missed that Cebit coverage before - I wish they'd moved to 8mm pipes on the Tx 2/3.

BTW, any chance of adding a Enzotech Ultra-X to your review lineup?

How about getting a preview sample of the Thermalright Ultima 90?

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