Cooling Efficiency Tests
Today I decided not to offer you a summary chart right away, but to discuss all work modes of the Scythe Orochi cooler during successful CPU overclocking. I would like to remind you once again that we performed the tests in an open testbed with the cooler installed so that the heatpipes were directed horizontally. So, let’s first of all check how a passive Scythe Orochi will cope with cooling a quad-core processor working in its nominal mode at 3000MHz frequency and Vcore set at 1.25V in the mainboard BIOS (~1.22V according to the monitoring data):
As we see, the CPU cooled with passive Scythe Orochi reaches its peak temperature of 60ºC during 13th minute of the test (we are not taking into account one single upsurge to 61ºC). Now let’s install a standard 140-mm fan and check the CPU temperature readings one roe time:
Well, using this fan allowed us to drop the temperature of the hottest processor core to 53ºC, i.e. by 7ºC. Taking into account large gaps between the heatsink plates, low fan rotation speed of a default fan (~500RPM) and nominal processor speed, this is a pretty decent result. However, it will hardly be of any value to overclockers, so let’s move on to checking out the processor overclocking potential with Scythe Orochi cooler.
By trial and numerous tests we found out that passive Scythe Orochi can properly cool a quad-core processor overclocked to 3750MHz with the Vcore set at 1.4875V in the mainboard BIOS (~1.46V according to the monitoring data):
Of course, 95ºC peak temperature of the hottest processor core looks very threatening and I doubt that you will dare have your CPU run like that for a long time. However, this is a very good result, because with a passive Scythe Ninja Copper we only managed to overclock our processor to 3650MHz at 1.4375V Vcore and 93ºC peak temperature.
So, now that we haven’t yet tested Thermalright IFX-14, we can conclude that Scythe Orochi is the best passive cooler we have checked out so far. However, do not forget that the room temperature in our lab was pretty low, so you shouldn’t hope to get the same results with passive Scythe Orochi in real summer heat.
