CoolIT ALC ECO review

Cooling 189 Page 6 of 9 Published by

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Testing the cooler

Testing the cooler

Time to test. As stated before, the cooler will work absolutely great with any processor from low to high-end (Phenom II/Core i5/i7 quad-core and even six-core included) at default operating speeds, and there's room left for overclocking as well.

Let me show you something, this is a Core i5 750 processor clocked at stock temperatures being cooled by the CPU cooler (PWM controlled by BIOS / Windows set at performance mode):

  • Core i5 750 in IDLE -- 29 Degrees C
  • Core i5 750 with 100% LOAD -- roughly 43 Degrees C

Coolit ALC ECO

Now, that's PWM controlled and thus at flexible RPM regulated by the motherboard BIOS setup. At this stage its a near silent cooling solution really, we can already tell that the cooler will deliver great performance, judging from these numbers.

Now what we always do (for a little more serious testing ) we test it with higher requirements, mildly overclocked as reference. We change the processor frequency and voltage.

Methodology -- We use an eVGA p55 Classified 200 motherboard, equiped with a Core i5 750 processor,  which we overclock towards 3.3 GHz / 1.3 Volts. Now we'll test the cooler in two utilization stages:

  1. Actively cooled - yet CPU has nothing to do (IDLE)
  2. Actively cooled - four processors cores 100% stressed (LOAD)

Let's have a look at the results compared to other coolers we tested under the same conditions. Below the IDLE temperatures.

As you can see the ECO cooler positions immediately itself in the high-end performance range of heatpipe based coolers. That really is quite okay for a 75 EUR cooler that remains fairly silent.

Mind you that we test at a controlled (either heated or ACed) room temperature of 21 degrees C.

But now let's have a look at the processors LOAD temperatures.

Please understand for the above results -- temperatures are based on a slightly overclocked Core i5 750 processor with a little extra voltage (1.3v), the fan speed is now locked at 80% RPM for objective comparison reasons -- temperatures wise -- obviously LOWER = BETTER.

At default though, for a cooler in this price-range, it's pretty good really. We are hovering at give or take 50 Degrees C with the processor slightly overclocked under full load.

Coolit ALC ECO

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