BenchZowner
08-14-2007, 09:47 AM
Hello folks, here's our latest review, a battle between the ThermalRight Ultra-120 Extreme & the Ultra-120 in the high end CPU Air Cooling category.
Some quotes from the review:
The summer is still here ( well, ending soon ) and the hot days are still here with us, trust me we're not the only ones affected from the "summer hottness" ®, while we really 'suffer' from the hot temperatures outside ( hot weather and hot chicks cruisin' how can your alarm not ring ? :-D ) our indoor entertainment/work 'friends', our computers feel the heat as well. Those of us who use the components stock coolers can feel the difference by the higher noise output sourcing from the lifted rotational speed of our cooling fans ( especially the ATi Radeon X1900XTX & HD 2900XT folks! ...no wonder the Prescott boys feel it a tad deeper though ) and some of us who overclocked our CPUs & VGAs with their stock coolers might ( most likely will ) have to lower our overclocks to keep the temperatures within reasonable ranges.
Some of us might want to find a better solution to cool their components better and reduce the noise generated by the cooling equipment, or just lower the noise generated.
That's why after-market coolers ( HSFs - HeatSink with Fan ) exist, to make our...components life better and let us work in a quieter environment ( at least that's what they should be looking to design ).
There are several ways to cool down a computer component, different types of cooling 'devices'...
Well, here's how we tested the coolers:
We've set up our hardware on our open air bench, with the motherboard being on top, and all the rest components far away ( to isolate the motherboard & the cooler from external heat ), we placed the system in the test room and let it cool down ( the room temperature remained stable at 68F ( 20C ) from the beginning to the end of the test ) for 15 minutes.Then we booted it up, and let it idle in Windows for 15 minutes, and at the end of that period we recorded the temperatures for both cores as shown in CoreTemp v0.94, these are the Idle temperatures.
After the idle test, we opened up BOINC and set it to run two Seti@Home workunits to put both cores in full stress ( Full Load ) ( 100% ).After 30 minutes we stopped recording the temperatures, and then summed 'em up to come up with our Full Load temperatures.
We would test the air coolers with more fans, but then again I said no, because people buy these heatsinks to get rid of any noisy stock/after-market cooler and have good temperatures altogether, putting up a noisy fan on these heatsinks doesn't feel right to me ( it'll probably not help as well ), so we ended up the tests with the SilenX fan only.
Here's the full review (http://www.benchzone.com/page.php?al=ultra_120_extreme_review)
Some quotes from the review:
The summer is still here ( well, ending soon ) and the hot days are still here with us, trust me we're not the only ones affected from the "summer hottness" ®, while we really 'suffer' from the hot temperatures outside ( hot weather and hot chicks cruisin' how can your alarm not ring ? :-D ) our indoor entertainment/work 'friends', our computers feel the heat as well. Those of us who use the components stock coolers can feel the difference by the higher noise output sourcing from the lifted rotational speed of our cooling fans ( especially the ATi Radeon X1900XTX & HD 2900XT folks! ...no wonder the Prescott boys feel it a tad deeper though ) and some of us who overclocked our CPUs & VGAs with their stock coolers might ( most likely will ) have to lower our overclocks to keep the temperatures within reasonable ranges.
Some of us might want to find a better solution to cool their components better and reduce the noise generated by the cooling equipment, or just lower the noise generated.
That's why after-market coolers ( HSFs - HeatSink with Fan ) exist, to make our...components life better and let us work in a quieter environment ( at least that's what they should be looking to design ).
There are several ways to cool down a computer component, different types of cooling 'devices'...
Well, here's how we tested the coolers:
We've set up our hardware on our open air bench, with the motherboard being on top, and all the rest components far away ( to isolate the motherboard & the cooler from external heat ), we placed the system in the test room and let it cool down ( the room temperature remained stable at 68F ( 20C ) from the beginning to the end of the test ) for 15 minutes.Then we booted it up, and let it idle in Windows for 15 minutes, and at the end of that period we recorded the temperatures for both cores as shown in CoreTemp v0.94, these are the Idle temperatures.
After the idle test, we opened up BOINC and set it to run two Seti@Home workunits to put both cores in full stress ( Full Load ) ( 100% ).After 30 minutes we stopped recording the temperatures, and then summed 'em up to come up with our Full Load temperatures.
We would test the air coolers with more fans, but then again I said no, because people buy these heatsinks to get rid of any noisy stock/after-market cooler and have good temperatures altogether, putting up a noisy fan on these heatsinks doesn't feel right to me ( it'll probably not help as well ), so we ended up the tests with the SilenX fan only.
Here's the full review (http://www.benchzone.com/page.php?al=ultra_120_extreme_review)