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

Initial thought: fair performance for the money!

We set our room temperature to roughly 21~22 Degrees C for an objective comparison. As you will learn, the cooler performs fairly well with regards to cooling our processor.

The setup used:

• nForce 790i Ultra SLI
• Core 2 Quad QX9770 (3.2 GHz / 1600 MHz FSB / 1.2 Volts)
• Core 2 Quad QX9770 (3.6 GHz / 1600 MHz FSB / 1.4 Volts)
• Crucial DDR3 memory
• 300 GB WD HDD
• GeForce 280 GTX BFG OC
• Power supply: Enermax 650W

CPU cooling with Core 2 Quad QX 9770 @ 3200 MHz / 1.2 Volts

For our tests we are going to look at the cooling performance in two setups. Our processor is a beefy one, as it's the 1600 MHz FSB quad core based Core 2 QX 9770 (Extreme Edition). By itself the processor runs quite hot due to its high FSB frequency, and in fact can be compared fairly close to the output wattage of a Core i7 processor.

We test this cooler in two modes and then three fan stages (40/60/80% RPM):

• Processor clocks at 3200 MHZ / Processor voltage 1.2v
• Processor clocks at 3600 MHZ / Processor voltage 1.4v

We have all power saving features in the BIOS and Windows Vista disabled. When enabled, our idle temperatures would be better, but we simply want to test in somewhat more extreme conditions.

As you can see in the chart above at a default 3200 MHz, the cooler is doing a fine job; it's safe to say your FAN RPM when selected automatically will run at roughly 60% RPM. With all 4 CPU cores massively stressed we only reach ~50 Degrees C / 122 F.

So that makes the cooler good in non overclocked thus in normal conditions. Very noteworthy is the fan, even at 80% RPM it is really silent. So you just might want to consider forcing it at 80% all the time. It will have a positive effect on overall cooling.

But let's move onwards to the next chart where we start to overclock the processor and apply a higher CPU voltage.