Testing and benchmarking

Testing and benchmarking

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

Initial thought: okay.

We set our room temperature towards roughly 21 Degrees C for an objective comparison. As you will see the 9900 LED is performing fairly well with regards to cooling our PC.

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
• Power supply: BFG 800W.

Sidenote, we also tried 4.0 GHz at 1.6 Volts. Unfortunately the cooler could not deal with temps well enough as the processors ran temps close to 89 when stressed. That's too high to safely test and as such we did not continue with a 4 GHz overclock, even with fan RPM at 80%.

Core 2 Quad QX9770 XE processor @ 40% Fan RPM

For our first test we are going to look at the cooling performance. Our processor is a beefy one, as it's the 1600 MHz FSB based quad core QX 9770. By itself the processor runs quite hot due to the high FSB frequency.

We will try three performance modes we'll check the Zalman cooler with, which we set manually in the BIOS:

• Fan RPM at 40% (LOW) = very silent
• Fan RPM at 60% (NORMAL) = slightly audible
• Fan RPM at 80% (HIGH) = audible

You can have your BIOS also have this regulated automatically which would results in a varying RPM anywhere in-between 30 and 60% RPM. We tested each (RPM) mode with the processor both in idle (nothing to do) and 100% stressed on all four cores with Prime95 software.

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

We have all power saving features in the BIOS and Windows vista disabled.

1. With LOW fan RPM in an LOAD status we see the processor roughly hover at 48 Degrees C / 118 F at default 3200 MHz.
2. With LOW fan RPM in an LOAD status we see the processor roughly hover at 61 Degrees C / 142 F at overclocked 3600 MHz.

So the cooler manages an up-to 3600 MHz overclock with LOW noise versus fine temperatures. But let's see if we can shave of some of the temperatures.

The cooler is perfect for a high-end processor when not overclocked and decent enough when overclocked as well, in near silent conditions.

Core 2 Quad QX9770 XE processor @ 60% Fan RPM

For our second test we are going to look at the cooling performance of the kit with an average RPM fan speed at 60%. The quad core QX 9770 is again measured at default 3200 MHz and overclocked towards 3600 MHz as well, with the core CPU voltage now increased towards 1.4 Volts.

Idle temperatures are fine, even overclocked we remain below 39 Degrees C / 102 F. The CPU cores stressed at a 3600 MHz clock frequency gave us only a 2 degree C improvement over the LOW RPM setting.
If you want my advice, stick to a low RPM mode for decent cooling performance and an inaudible environment.