Now that the cooler is installed, juiced up and working as an actual cooling solution, let's run some performance tests.

Initial thought: pretty darn nice.

We set our room temperature to roughly 21 Degrees C for an objective comparison. As you will see, the cooler is performing really well with regards to cooling our processor.

The setup used:

• ASUS X58 ROG edition Rampage II Extreme
• Core i7 965 @ 3300 MHz (3.2 + Turbo mode)
• Core i7 965 @ 3750 MHz (3.6 + Turbo mode)
• Core i7 965 @ 4000 MHz
• 6144 MB (3x 2048 MB) DDR3 1800 MHz Corsair @ 1500 MHz CAS8
• 300 GB WD HDD
• eVGA GeForce 285 GTX
• Power supply: BFG 1200W.
• Coolermaster Aquagate MAX with dual 120mm radiator and fans

Cooling a Core i7 processor

For our test we are going to look at the cooling performance in three setups. Our processor is a beefy one, actually it's the best one your money can get you. It's the Core i7 965, default clocked at 3200 MHz already.

We test this cooler in three stages:

• Processor clocks at 3200 MHZ + Turbo / Processor voltage 1.12v
• Processor clocks at 3600 MHZ + Turbo / Processor voltage 1.36v
• Processor clocks at 4000 MHZ / Processor voltage 1.45v

Please make note of this fact: we have all power saving features in the BIOS and Windows Vista disabled.
If enabled, our idle temperatures would be even better, but we simply want to test in more extreme conditions.

As you can see in the chart above the cooler is doing a pretty darn nice job, even with a processor overclock at 3750 MHz when we stress all four CPU cores, we max out at roughly 65 Degrees C / 149 F. That really is pretty okay for a mid-range water-cooling setup. Remember, this is overclocked at 3600 MHz + Turbo mode = 3750 MHz (!).

Taking it a notch up, even at 4000 MHz (at 1.45v) we stumble into a situation where the processor remains 100% stable. And sure, at roughly 71~74 degrees C / 160 F we are on the high side. But remember, we are using a mid-range run of the mill CoolerMaster Aquagate MAX kit here. Go high-end on the water-cooling loop, and the results will simply be even better.

But remember, typically you never stress the CPU like this:

Click to enlarge

We are pushing really hard here. Only if say, you would encode multimedia files using all CPU cores for very long time periods, this kind of stress would be reproduced. With a high-end radiator/pump/reservoir, the numbers would guaranteed be even better.