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: fair performance for the money.
We set our room temperature to roughly 21 Degrees C for an objective comparison. As you will see, the cooler performs 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)
- Crucial DDR3 memory
- 300 GB WD HDD
- GeForce 280 GTX BFG OC
- Power supply: BFG 1200W
CPU cooling with Core 2 Quad QX 9770 @ 3200 MHz / 1.2 Volts
For our tests we are going to look at the cooling performance in two different setups. Our processor is a beefy one, as it's the 1600 MHz FSB quad core based Core 2 QX 9770 (Extreme Edition). By itself the processor runs quite hot due to its high FSB frequency.
We test this cooler in three stages:
- Processor clocks at 3200 MHZ / Processor voltage 1.2v
- Processor clocks at 3600 MHZ / Processor voltage 1.4v
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 cooler is doing a pretty nice job; it's safe to say your FAN RPM when selected automatically will run at roughly 40%~60% RPM. With all 4 CPU cores massively stressed we only reach 43 Degrees C / 110 F.
So the cooler is very good in non overclocked thus in normal conditions.
But let's move onwards to the next chart where we start to overclock the processor and apply a higher CPU voltage.
