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 cooler is performing 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)
• Core 2 Quad QX9770 (4.0 GHz / 1600 MHz FSB / 1.6 Volts)
• Crucial DDR3 memory
• 300 GB WD HDD
• GeForce 280 GTX
• Power supply: BFG 1200W.

Core 2 Quad QX9770 XE processor @ 60% Fan RPM

For our test we are going to look at the cooling performance in three setups. 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.

Normally we try three ventilator performance modes we'd check the cooler with. Unfortunately the Hyper N520 ventilators do not seem to have PWM control. Meaning it is fixed at a constant 1800 RPM.

So we tested this cooler in three stages:

• Processor clocks at 3200 MHZ / Processor voltage 1.2v (default clock frequency)
• Processor clocks at 3600 MHZ / Processor voltage 1.4v
• Processor clocks at 4000 MHZ / Processor voltage 1.6v

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 the Hyper N520 is doing a pretty nice job, even with a processor overclock at 3600 MHz at 1.4 volts when we stress all four CPU cores, we max out at roughly 56 Degrees C / 133 F. That really is okay.

We have yet to find an air cooler which can cope with a 4000 MHz processor overclock @ 1.6 Volts though :)

The DBa noise level reading are fairly high. The cooler fans are rotating at 1800 RPM, fixed. While that created a lot of airflow and thus good cooling performance, the reality is also that we measures a 43 BDa sound pressure coming from the PC. This mean you will be able to hear the fan continuously. Not at an annoying level .. but it's there alright.

Competitive chart

Here we can compare the cooler towards all other coolers we recently tested. This test is done at a 3600 Mhz QX9770 processor clock frequency with 1.4 volts jammed into the CPU. For all coolers, the fans are locked at 60% fan rotation, the Hyper N520 however has a fixed RPM of 1800 due to the lack of PWM conrtrol.

As such, as you can see, the Hyper N520 can hold ground pretty decent. It is competing with OCZ's Venedetta 2 and Zalman's CNPS 9900 LED cooler. So yeah, that's just fairly good.