Intro

The summer is coming to an end soon, yet the weather remains hot in Belgium lately. At the time of this writing it's ~30 °C in my room. I'm glad I tested the coolers a couple of days earlier. Once again your CPU is suffering from the heat. Perhaps a new cooler? We have a collection of 4 latest A64 Coolers, presenting to you "The A64 Cooler Roundup Summer 2005".

It might not beat or even match JMke's earlier A64 cooler roundup; tried as hard as I could this review has some new coolers that might get your attention.

I'll go directly to the point. First a description of the test setup and methodology, then an overview and separate description of the coolers, testing and conclusion. No time to lose, I don't want to keep the student readers away too long from their home work ;-)


Test setup & Methodology :

Piotke's Test Setup
CPU	AMD sempron 2600+
Cooling	Boxed cooler Coolermaster Hyper 6+ Speeze EE782B3 CopperReef Scythe Katana asetek VapoChill Micro Series
Mainboard	Albatron K8 Ultra-U Pro
VGA	Albatron MX480
Memory	2*512 Mb A-Data Vitesta DDR600
PSU	Antec TrueControl 550 Watt

Of course, I don't use my system on default clockspeeds. I added an extra 400 mhz to the cpu:



The Sempron 2600+ @ 2000 Mhz and 1.6 vcore is putting out close to 100 Watt according to this online calculator.

All results were taken with room temperature at ~27°C. Due to room temp fluctuations, different mounting and user error can account up to 1-2°C of inaccuracy from 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.

Setup was installed in a case less environment

Noise level of each fan was recorded with SmartSensor SL4001A. The sensor was placed ~65cm away from the HSF. The lowest dBA reading in the test room was ~32 dBA.

System was stressed by running 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 colour as Ceramique, requiring a mere 30-minute of break-in time!

Time for the first contestant, here comes Coolermaster ! >>>