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Twenty Five Intel CPU Coolers Tested
Kez writes "Over recent years coolers have grown increasingly exotic in design, striving for good cooling performance and low noise even with the most power hungry of CPUs. But sometimes that comes at a price, be it straining the motherboard's socket to its limit, or the wallets of PC enthusiasts. Investigating which coolers do their job well without snapping your motherboard in two, HEXUS.net reviews 25 LGA775 coolers."
I'm pretty sure they're using the same amount of power, but just getting rid of wasted heat better. I might be wrong. Does a cooler chip need less power to do a certain action than the same chip running warm?
I have a CNPS7700-AlCu. It's a cheaper one than the one they review - and also smaller. The piece of metal with the vanes sits straight on the CPU with no heat pipes or anything. What they don't mention is that even my smaller cooler is technically out-of-spec - they're heavier than a LGA775 cooler should be, but motherboards don't actually snap that easily.
Anyway, the cooler comes with a device for adjusting it's speed, and it is practically silent on the lowest setting while still providing pretty good cooling. It helps that my processor isn't a very hot one (Intel Core 2 Duo 6300), but even on the silent setting I cannot make it go over 49 C. In fact, the vanes have enough surface area that if it's a cold day, the cooler works fine disconnected, i.e. without the fan turning.
As they say, fitting it can be a pain, but that is presumably the price you pay for fitting some 700g of copper on the motherboard.
By the way, it's worth taking measurements or checking their list of supported motherboards - it's physical dimensions are beyond the LGA775 spec as well. It extends out over the components immediately surrounding the CPU, and on my motherboard it neatly blows air through the northbridge and GPU heatsinks.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
Some really, really great coolers, like the Noctua U12 or the Ultra 120 Extreme, don't fare very well on their test.
Also, if you haven't noticed, there's no word about fan noise... Which is extremely important to a lot of people. What good is a couple of degrees difference between cooler A and cooler B, if the latter includes a 4000 fan that sounds like a jet engine while the former is inaudible in a closed case?
Look elsewhere if you want to read proper articles about the subject.
A lot more people are aiming to have silent computers nowadays. While the cooling capabilities may suffice, they are very loud. Personally, I can't understand how anyone can be in the same room with the sound of a stock cooler, let alone try to sleep in the same room with one.
You're somewhat right.
But that article is not targeted at most users. It's targeted at geeks like us, who want either:
a) A quiter PC
b) A PC that will last longer because their components ran cooler
c) People who stress their CPUs a lot and want to ensure they are not going to die prematurely (gamers and powerusers).
d) Overclockers
Also, why are datacenters and server rooms often air conditioned to well below room temperature? Longer life, true, but also better stability. See how long you can run Prime95 on your PC without an error. Eventually you will get one, and if you had the time to do some thorough testing, you would see a trend...the hotter your components, the sooner you would get an error.
Something worth noting is major PC manufacturers rarely use stock cooling. The usually have ducted systems for CPU cooling.
(Oh, nice job on including the obligatory slashdot car reference. While you probably would never see a difference between Penzoil, Valvoline, and Quaker State, you would eventually see a difference between those and bottom shelf crap oil.)
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True, but some people (such as myself) have a different/additional obsession: silent computing. Stock heatsink/fan combos usually do an adequate cooling job, but don't necessarily do it quietly. With an efficient heatsink, you can often run the fan more slowly (or not at all with a low-power CPU) and drastically reduce the amount of noise coming from you PC.
Some people buy OEM to save cash, and a cheap cooler helps them with that
One is a passively cooled sink, so if you're not concerned about the few degrees centigrade difference, but are majorly concerned about noise, you can get a passively cooled one that doesn't cool as well as stock sink, but it also has no fan.