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Testing

For our testing we took a simple approach. We took a reference D975BXB 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 overclocked the processor.

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

We have the CPU running at a 1.45 core Voltage, boosted the FSB towards 1333 MHz (333) resulting in a 3.0 GHz processor frequency (2.4 GHz = default). To make it a little tougher, we disabled CE1 and Speedstep technology in the BIOS.

This is a 100% stable overclock by the way. What we will do is measure the temperature in degrees C for both coolers with the processor either in idle or 100% utilized. Also we measure without active cooling (fan), with the low noise fan, with the high performance fan, and both fans.

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.

Here are the results.

Here we see the results.

• CPU idle obviously is the processor doing nothing.
• CPU 100% load is the CPU stress test with both the CPU cores running at maximum.
• dBA noise level - the measured noise level coming from the PC.

I have to say that the dBA levels are very subjective, as it is showing the noise levels from the surroundings, the fan from the PSU and other factors weigh in easily. Considering we're close to 30 dBA with the PC turned off this, test remains subjective.

Yet as an indication it works out fine. These scores tell us that the cooling solution indeed is extremely silent.

Let's move onward to the analysis and verdict.