Page 9
Testing and benchmarking
Now that the system is hooked up and running, let's run some performance tests.
First
thought after installation: friggin impressive!First off though we hooked up the unit to a standalone PSU with nothing else connected to it other then the pump to look at power consumption of this unit.
Here we can see the power consumption of the pump plus radiator fan activated. A steady 27 Watts will be consumed for cooling. Now with the unit installed let's focus back on how the unit manages temperatures.
System:
- NVIDIA Reference nForce 590 SLI Intel
- Core 2 Duo Conroe E6600
- GeForce 7900 GTX 512MB
- 2 GB PDP Patriot memory
- 5x 300GB HD
- 1x Optical DVD burner
- BeQuiet! 600 Watt PSU
The CPU was running steady at a ~37 C temperature right after windows booted up yet it climbed up even further. As part of the test we maxed the workload of the CPU to 100% for ten minutes, managing some serious encoding work.
|
Celsius |
Farenheit |
|
20.00 |
68.00 |
|
21.00 |
69.80 |
|
22.00 |
71.60 |
|
23.00 |
73.40 |
|
24.00 |
75.20 |
|
25.00 |
77.00 |
|
26.00 |
78.80 |
|
27.00 |
80.60 |
|
28.00 |
82.40 |
|
29.00 |
84.20 |
|
30.00 |
86.00 |
|
31.00 |
87.80 |
|
32.00 |
89.60 |
|
33.00 |
91.40 |
|
34.00 |
93.20 |
|
35.00 |
95.00 |
|
36.00 |
96.80 |
|
37.00 |
98.60 |
|
38.00 |
100.40 |
|
39.00 |
102.20 |
|
40.00 |
104.00 |
What you need to keep in mind with a passively cooled system that temperature is extremely dependant on the surrounding ambient heat in your house. So if we measure at 15 Degrees C we'd have completely different results compared to a warm day at 30 Degrees C. So that would have an adverse effect on overclocking as well.
We use the cool tool Core Temp v0.9.0.91 which measures Intel's "Core", "Core 2" and all AMD K8 chips' die temperature. The temperature readings 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.
At a 23 Degrees C ambient room temperature the Core 2 Duo processor idles at 32 Degrees C on the first Core and with the second at 30 Degrees C which is quite amazing considering this is a passively cooled system. But obviously what matters is the temperature when the system CPU is working at 100% for a while.
We loop a CPU intensive encoding job and notice 100% CPU utilization on both CPU cores. Now we monitor for a while and simply observe what the absolute highest temperature value was.
We have two cores and both are measured. The E6600 processor Core 1 was maxing out at 43C and Core 2 at 41C.
I don't know what you think but that's amazing. The temps are really okay. It's almost a high-end high performance unit, mainly due to the tremendous radiator which can dispose heat really well. Again, with a higher room-temperature these results would be higher though.
We overclocked the E6600 CPU and temps went up at a peak of roughly 53 Degrees C measured over time. Our end result was a ~3.2 GHz E6600 Processor.
On passive cooling, thus completely silent, that is just an amazing result.
