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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 have seen less adverts on a domain squatters site, running a website must be really expensive if you have to be that desperate to plaster the page with 20+ adverts per page (from multiple advert servers) and as a result create a page that is over 400kb of tracking/advert scripts and images when the actual content you read is about 1kb
i guess dignity has no place on that site, or this one for that matter for linking to such a pathetic excuse for a website
When was the last time a CPU failed at stock speed with the stock cooler?
The obsession with aftermarket cooling solutions for all but the harder core overclockers strikes me as about as ridiculous as engine oil companies' claims of their oil increasing engine life over other oils. When was the last time you heard about an engine seizing that didn't straight-up run out of oil or suffer from a factory error?
Ok, all nice and cute... ...But ONE HUNDRED AND NINETEEN pages to describe CPU coolers?
I mean, WTF? Next time, just put one word per page, alongside 29763410974 banners/links/ads and be done with it. This kind of... err... "journalism" is spiraling down. Quickly.
I know I will miss some incredibly useful piece of vital information by avoiding to read all 119 pages. But I also know there are more creative ways to offend my own intelligence.
Sadly, you are off by an order of magnitude. This article is spread over 120 pages, with no print version available. I'd almost say that this is a record, but I fear someone will prove me wrong.
The graph for CPU temp under load - my question is, if you're an aftermarket cooler maker, and you can't even beat the Intel stock cooler, why exactly did you go to market?
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
I mean it just seems to me to be ridiculous to have detailed review of the packaging of all these coolers, and to pick a winner on something we'll throw out, but not to measure one of the most important factors in choosing a cooler -- noise levels.
I just can't fathom why the packaging review, it makes me suspect the motives of the whole thing.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
I've have a (sucky) Dell desktop and when it is clean inside it runs quietly, even at 100% CPU load. Then as the days go by and the dog scratches his derriere repeatedly the fan noise rises. After about 10 days to two weeks I have to shut it down, vacuum it thoroughly inside and it is quiet once again.
So, how do these coolers perform with some dust in them? That is the cooler I want for the increased uptime.
I come here for the love
Ok, why would anyone spend $50+ to buy one of these monstrosities? Two reasons:
1. You want safe overclocked performance from the latest Core2Duo processors
2. You want a 'quiet' CPU cooling solution
This review utterly failed to achieve either end-user goal because they failed to even attempt to control variables, among other problems. Instead they:
1. Completely ignored noise as an issue. Sure the winning heatsink has huge heat pipes and all, but does its built-in fan sound like a jet engine to achieve its mark?
2. Did not standardize on a single 3rd-party fan to control for the huge variance in quality from one manufacturer to another.
3. Did not standardize on a single high performance thermal compound, but rather used whatever cheap goo each manufacturer stuck in the box.
4. No indication whether any of the extra cooling performance achieved by the top sinks actually has any positive effect on overclockability (aside from noise, the only other reason why you might reasonably consider one of these heatsinks). Many overclockers fail to achieve >50% overclocks of Core2Duo due to voltage regulation, memory or chipset cooling issues, independent of CPU cooling. For example, if your motherboard can't maintain a consistent voltage for the CPU under load, it doesn't matter that your heatsink achieves -270 degrees Kelvin.
So, in summary, all I've found out is which retail combination keeps my CPU coolest, irregardless of noise and whether the extra cooling performance actually matters. Hmmmm...great. IMHO, if you need to buy one of these things (like I did a while back) do yourself a favor and go read http://www.silentpcreview.com/ . They're a lot more scientific about their methodology.
Disclaimer: I do not and have not ever worked for, nor do I know anyone who works for SilentPCReview, I just happen to think their testing methods suck a lot less.