Cooling Efficiency and Acoustic Performance

Intel Core 2 Duo Platform

I would like to allow myself to veer a little bit away before we start. One of the biggest events of the past month for me appeared the arrival of the Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 processor (2.66GHz) with new G0 core stepping. And it is not only overclocking that made this so exciting (actually overclocking results turned out not that impressive), but the CPU temperature. Compared with the previously used Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 (2.13GHz) with B2 core stepping that overclocked to 3.6GHz with 1.55V Vcore, the temperature of our E6750 clocked to 3.8GHz with 1.65V Vcore appeared 8°C lower in idle mode and 10°C (!) lower under peak workload. Of course, we used identical test platform and performance our tests in the same conditions. I believe this difference in processor core temperatures is more than just impressive. And compared against quad-core processors with the new B3 core stepping, the temperature readings from the E6750 are awfully low, which you will see later on in our review today. So, if you are looking to improve the cooling efficiency for your processor, just get the new core stepping for your Intel Core 2 Duo or Core 2 Quad :)

We managed to overclock our new CPU on G0 core stepping equipped with Gigabyte Volar cooler to a pretty decent frequency of 3.75GHz inside a system case. The core voltage was increased from the nominal 1.35V to 1.65V in the mainboard BIOS:

Nevertheless, CPU-Z, Everest and Gigabyte’s brand name EasyTune utility reported that the Vcore equaled 1.6-1.62V and under workload dropped down to 1.56-1.58V:

Despite that, the processor test from the OCCT suite was successfully passed twice without any errors or thermal throttling activation.

Now let’s check out the thermal chart for the dual-core processor:

Surprisingly, the new Gigabyte cooler lost not only to Thermaltake Big Typhoon and Thermalright Ultra-120 eXtreme, but also to the regular boxed Intel cooler. Unfortunately, neither three copper heatpipes, nor 120mm fan that is 38mm tall, nor the heatsink array that is bigger than that of Intel boxed solutions helped the Volar cooler in this battle. The problem might be poor contact between the cooler heatsink ribs and the central heatpipe, because even at minimal fan rotation speed, the heatsink is barely warm.

And here are the results obtained under maximum processor load:

Gigabyte Volar retains the last position in this race, even though at maximum fan rotation speed, the processor temperature is 1°C lower than in case of a boxed Intel cooler. I would also like to point out that the difference in CPU overclocking results between the Intel boxed cooler and the two super coolers participating in our tests was really small. It could be the not very high overclocking potential of the processor or the new mainboard that affected these results. Also, we increased the processor Vcore to 1.7V when we tested with Thermaltake Big Typhoon and Thermalright Ultra-120 eXtreme, however, the monitoring utilities reported it equal to 1.65-1.675V.

Now let’s move on to a very hot quad-core processor.