Conclusion

We have to admit that the Gigabyte Volar cooler turned out not that efficient, unfortunately. The tests performed with two different processors revealed that it is at best as efficient as a boxed cooler from Intel. It generates very little noise at minimal fan rotation speed, but subjectively, it is just a little beyond the comfortable level. Its efficiency doesn’t increase in proportion to the generated noise at maximum fan rotation speed, so, the results here also leave much to be desired. You can hardly benefit from better cooling of the around-the-socket area while the CPU cooling efficiency is so low. Besides, the price of this solution is also a little too high for its features, so we can’t recommend this cooler. We hope that Gigabyte G-Power II Pro that is already being tested in our lab will rehabilitate Gigabyte coolers for overclockers.

P.S.: when I completed all the tests I managed to get my hands on a new G0 core stepping for quad-core Intel Core 2 Quad processor. The difference in thermal results from the older B3 core stepping turned out even greater here:

CPU with G0 core stepping appeared cooler during the same overclocking in identical conditions than the CPU with B3 core stepping. The difference reached 18°C under peak workload. In idle mode the difference was also pretty impressive and hit 13-14°C.