Gigabyte ATC700 AORUS CPU cooler review

Cooling 189 Page 10 of 10 Published by

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Final words and conclusion

Final words and conclusion

Quite honestly I was hoping to see a little more perf out of the ATC700, it's not a bad cooler though. However I believe that with the right mounting system this cooler could easily shaved of a few more degrees C. The cooling design certainly has that harbored in it. There are a couple of problems though, the cooler design is lovely period. That mounting system however is not to my liking. If you have a motherboard with plastic shielding like the Sabertooth we used today does (and this IS exactly the reason why we use it) you could only mount it in the position as shown today. That also means you'd need to miss out on one rank of your DIMMs as there is not enough clearance for it. Secondly, you'll have a hard time mounting the four thumbscrews on the riser nuts as they sit under the fans. In our case we had to disassemble the two fans and the top LED RGB unit to reach the nuts and secure the cooler. No biggy really, but it could have been so much better. Last but not least, the metal bracket that needs to be mounted to the CPU block is secured with just two screws, and that in my opinion is a design flaw as when there is pressure on one side, the other one gets lifted. I could wiggle the cooler on the CPU cooling base with just two fingers rocking back and forth. Two more holes and screws an extra 5 cents in production would have bypassed that issue and likely would offer better mounting with more pressure on the CPU block as well. We see this a lot with companies trying to offer heatpipe based solution, great cooling designs - but then they often have the most weird mounting solutions that not always will work to their benefit.

Noise

Noise levels, at processor defaults make this an silent product, on our ASUS Sabertooth we simply leave the default fan profile for what it is, and yeah we reached 37~38 DBa under full processor load. Up-to 1.30 Volts (tweaked) the noise levels remain reasonably silent at a measured 40~41 DBa. That does mean you can some airflow at that stage. After 1.35v the cooler quickly runs into issues with the processor tested. Then again, that is a 4790K and that happens with a lot of heat-pipe designs in the 200 Watt thermal capacity ranges.

 
  

Aesthetics & Design

The looks always remain trivial as taste differs, but for a product in this price range we do feel you are getting a nice looking product. The black fans with the dark accents with top RGB lit an configurable options is pretty cool looking. We would have liked to see nickle plated fins though. And yeah, a bit of buzz-kill is that USB wire eh?

Performance

The cooler performed "good" at default, and overclocked at 1.30 Volts I'd labe it as OK. Remember that our test system has the difficult to cool Core i7 4790K, obviously on purpose. The default clock frequency performance is good enough, nothing more, nothing less. Overclocking with a CPU like this and a heatpipe cooler typically is ill-advised, though the Core Frozer L can take a bit of a beating alright. With our 4790K processor at 1.3 Volts / 4600 MHz heat jumped to 79 Degrees C. 

Final Words

The basis of this cooler works, it is well designed with the huge 10mm heat-pipes and DTH cooling block design. What lacks is a proper mounting system, as described in this review. If I was a PM at Gigabyte, I'd 0overhaul that mounting system. The end result however is a cooler that runs silent enough, looks nice and performs okay enough when in normal conditions. Hey remains to be a heatpipe cooler right? Also with two fans the cooler is a little big and if you have a motherboard (like we used) with thick plastic shielding and stuff, you might need to mount the cooler 90 degrees differently (as shown in the top photo). The product shows decent but not exceptional cooling performance. It however does that with a relatively an low noise level, which we like. I am withholding an award due to the mounting issues mentioned. The facts remain simple, that mounting system needs to be better and yeah .. the price as well at $79,-

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