Cooling Efficiency and Acoustic Performance

Using the “weakest” cooling system with a quiet fan we managed to overclock our quad-core 45nm processor to 3.8MHz inside the system case. The processor Vcore was increased to 1.525V in the mainboard BIOS:

The monitoring utilities reported a little lower voltage setting than the one in the mainboard BIOS: 1.48~1.5V:

Click to enlarge

The test results of our today’s heroes and their rivals are given on the diagram below:

As we have expected, the first newcomer, XIGMATEK Achilles S1284, didn’t prove very efficient against the participating competitors. Moreover, its performance was very poor when tested inside a system case: it fell 15ºC behind the leader! In an open testbed where Thermalright SI-128 SE has no advantage of a 120-mm fan on the case side panel, Achilles S1284 catches up a little, but the remaining 9ºC gap is still pretty significant.

The second new cooler, ZEROtherm ZEN FZ120 performs much more confident in our today’s test session. No, it didn’t outperform the flagship product of ZEROtherm’s lineup, Nirvana NV120 Premium, even at identical fan rotation speeds (I have to remind you that the latter has some extra speed in reserve: up to ~2700RPM, without any negative effect on the acoustics). However, since ZEN FZ120 is cheaper, we hardly had the right to expect otherwise. Nevertheless, ZEN FZ120 and Nirvana NV120 Premium turned out equally efficient in an open testbed and fell just a tiny bit behind Thermalright SI-128 SE with our overclocked processor. In case of higher CPU overclocking and further Vcore increase, the advantage of Thermalright super-cooler increases a little more. However, with the scorching hot weather outside I decided to skip maximum CPU overclocking this time for safety reasons :)