Page 11 (Tests)

Testing thermals and sound levels

For our testing we took a simple approach. We took a reference nForce 680i Intel based mainboard, fitted a E6600 Core 2 Duo processor on it, and to make this test at the very least a bit challenging, we look at the processor in it's normal and overclocked condition.

We believe that anyone out there visiting Guru3D.com with an E6600 processor is overclocking at the very least up-to roughly 3 GHz.

Well, 3 GHz is not for guru's, we scrammed 1.65volts in the CPU and clocked it towards 3600 MHz, a 1200 MHz overclock. See, now we're talking guru !

This is a 100% stable overclock by the way. What we will do is measure the temperature in degrees C in both conditions with the processor either in idle or 100% utilized versus the fan  rotational Low, Medium and High settings which obviously directly related to the RPM of the two fans on the radiator.

To stress the processor we fire off a session of 3DMark06 processors stress test; both processor cores will be 100% utilized. Now, we did not use a BIOS monitoring tool to check temperature as they often are off by a couple of degrees. The Core 2 Duo processors have independent thermal probes mounted directly onto the core of the processor. With the help of this great little tool called CoreTemp, we can do temperature readings that are very accurate as the data is collected from a Digital Thermal Sensor (or DTS) which is located in each individual processing core, near the hottest part. We measures at a 23 degrees C room temperature.

Here are the results.

So what this tells us is that the for a non-overclocked CPU the temperatures are really excellent. Even at 100% CPU load over an extended period of time you'll have great thermals even at the LOW setting.

Overclocked we still see very nice results, remember a 1200 MHz overclock at 3.6 GHz with 1.65 volts crammed into the processor is  lot to coop with for any kind of cooling. I do feel that ith this overclock you'll need to stick at medium RPM for the radiator fans. That's slightly more noisy though.

Since we touch the topic of noise, I have measured the db(a) levels for you guys in the given three conditions. Have a peek at the db(a) levels all the way to the right.

Now as you can see 43 db(a) on LOW is pretty okay. I mean you can hear the PC as the pump makes noise plus you have the rest of the fans creating airflow.

Setting the RPM at medium will have a slightly increased effect on sound levels, it's noticeable in the environment now for sure. High however produces so much noise that it's just not an option. If you exceed 55 DBa then that's just a no-go in a house environment at all. Alright, enough chatter. Let's go and have a look at the verdict.