Cooling Efficiency and Acoustic Performance

Our regular readers may have already guessed that the weakest cooling solution today will be the new CoolIT PURE, because with this cooler installed we could only push our processor to 3.75GHz having raised the Vcore to 1.4875V in the mainboard BIOS. The hottest processor core throughout our test session hit 84ºC temperature:

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Not a remarkable result, I should say. CoolIT PURE still has 250-300MHz to go before hitting the maximum processor overclocking rate. Besides, it failed to outperform ZEROtherm NV120 Premium, as you may have already understood:

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As we see, ZEROtherm super-cooler gets 15ºC ahead of the compact liquid-cooling solution from CoolIT even in moderately noisy operational mode with the fan rotating at ~1440RPM. Besides, we could overclock our test CPU to the maximum (I am only talking about the maximum achievable with an air cooler). And the good thing is that there are over a dozen coolers like that out there these days.

However, we were not talking about an air cooler today, but about CoolIT PURE liquid-cooling system. At this point I only have to add that this solution is pretty noisy in case of high processor load, which is quite natural for a 120 x 120 x 25mm fan working at ~2000RPM. Here are the obtained results: 3cm – 53.5dBA, 1m – 36.8dBA, 3m – 35.7dBA. So, if the subjectively comfortable noise level at a 1m distance is around 34.5dBA, this cooling system goes far beyond this number. When the processor workload is minimal the 120-mm fan rotation speed drops down to ~1000RPM and the liquid-cooling system gets considerably quieter, however, in this case you can clearly hear the pump working. Not a big deal, but still.

Conclusion

Well, looks like overclockers can take one more liquid-cooling system off their options list. Some of you may have already realized it before the actual tests, but others arrived at this conclusion after reading through our today’s brief article. Does CoolIT PURE have any real advantages? It certainly does: universal design, compact size, complete pre-assembly and ready-to-use state, relatively simple installation procedure. All this is true for CoolIT PURE, but at the same time, it is also available at a much lower price with less noise and even better efficiency. In this case, I can hardly say who the potential CoolIT PURE users might be. Maybe those people who are willing to pay $95 for it just like the opportunity to say that they have got a really COOL cooling system :)