Date:
Thursday , October 15, 2009
Author:
Marc Adams
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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Intel Core i7 Cooler Review

New CPU coolers from Kingwin, Thermal Transtech International, and ZALMAN. While air cooling has gotten about as good as it can possibly get, all of these coolers bring something unique to the table. But do these units perform? We find out.

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Results: Temperatures

For our stock testing our i7 920 will be kept at 2.66 GHz with a minimal 1.25v. For overclocked CPU testing we will be running our i7 920 at 3.6GHz with 1.45v. Idle temperatures will be recorded after a fifteen minute period of inactivity. Any fluctuation during the last sixty seconds will reset the timer for an additional five minutes. Load temperatures will be recorded after a fifteen minute period of 100% load. To obtain this load we will be using Prime95 v25.3. Any fluctuation during the last sixty seconds will reset the timer for an additional five minutes.

Please note the following scores are normalized to the ambient temperature. This will show you visually the rise above ambient temperature as well as the overall temperature. Since we are dealing with air cooling it is physically impossible for the temps to be less than ambient. This is why we start our charts at 25º C.

Stock Settings

These results will show us the range of the coolers and how well they operate across varying levels of fan speed and airflow. An apple to apples comparison using the same fan was also made and those results are further down the page.

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All the competitors here show good numbers early on in the testing. They all perform better than the Intel box cooler, albeit some more so than others. The most surprising result for me is how well nPower’s Hurricane performed. With one fan it comes to within a single degree Celsius of the TRUE and using two fans pushes it one degree Celsius past it. I guess there is something more to their heat column than just marketing hype. This leaves me wondering though. How well would it have performed if those "missing" heat pipes had been included?

Overclock Settings

It’s time to crank up the heat and see who cracks first.

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In similar fashion to the stock settings ZALMAN’s CNPS9900 LED cooler takes the top spot at maximum RPMs. Turning down the speeds also drops it down the rankings just behind the TRUE. This gives the cooler a wide range of possibilities from hard core overclocking to possible HTPC duty.

Apples to Apples

For this portion we took the various heat sinks and removed the fan they came with and replaced it with a Thermaltake Thunderblade A1926. This is a 120mm fan that pushes a lot of air. Where the other charts show you the out of box experience you can expect with these coolers this chart will show you a direct comparison of the heat sinks themselves. We thought that an A2A fan would show some interesting results, because we are SURE that some [H] readers have already thought, "Man, I bet these heat sinks would kick some ass with a real fan on it!"

The results below are taken with our overclocked settings for maximum punishment.

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Since the ZALMAN CNPS9900 LED does not use a standard 120mm fan for its cooling duty we are unable to test it in our apples to apples scenario.

With that in mind we see which heat sink performs the best when all other variables are kept constant. The TRUE gets to keep its crown for at least a little while longer.

Let’s now turn our attention to the sound portion of our testing to see if these coolers can cut it in an HTPC environment.