The latest AMD and Intel platforms have created quite a few new challenges in the thermal department. Although the processors themselves are operating much hotter than ever before, the same can be said about the supportive motherboards. The motherboards now have a number of hot spots that need to be seriously addressed, particularly when overclocking. While chipset temperatures can get quite high now, it is the motherboards power circuitry that can be a real cause for concern. Not so long ago I ran some fairly extensive tests on a few new budget coolers from Gigabyte. They were compared against a few air-cooled heatsinks and also some water cooled ones.
Surprisingly, despite allowing the processor to operate at a much lower temperature, the water cooled configurations seemed to produce quite a lot of heat from the motherboard. Water cooled systems are excellent because they do an incredible job of keeping the processor cool. However, they are not always a silent cooling solution as most users believe them to be. This is particularly true when using the latest AMD or Intel processors. The motherboards chipset can also be water cooled so this component is not such a problem. However, the power circuitry would be almost impossible to cool via means of water. Therefore, a water cooled system is still going to need additional fan(s) moving air over the MOSFETs.
The Gigabyte budget coolers I mentioned earlier were of course air-cooled by rather impressive fans. They were also able to circulate some air over the board's power circuitry and chipset. This resulted in a much safer operating environment for the whole system, though it was difficult to keep the 3.73GHz EE processor at a respectable temperature without using water cooling. Today I will be introducing two new Gigabyte coolers designed to further improve entire system cooling. Known as the G-Power series these coolers are able to effectively cool the processor and all its surrounding components.
The physical appearance of this heatsink is much like that of the Thermalright XP-90, though there are a number of differences between the two. The XP-90 fins are attached to the base where as they are not on the G-Power Coolers. Furthermore, the G-Power Coolers ship with impressive cooling fans and the ?Pro?version even includes a fan speed controller. The design of the G-Power Cooler should also be far more effective for cooling the surrounding components. The G-Power Cooler is an interesting heatsink and certainly has the potential to be one of the best air-cooled solutions yet.
Gigabyte Working on Quad-SLI Motherboard (2005-06-01)