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: Okay.

We set our room temperature towards roughly 21 Degrees C for an objective comparison. As you will see the cooler is performing 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)
• Core 2 Quad QX9770 (4.0 GHz / 1600 MHz FSB / 1.6 Volts)
• Crucial DDR3 memory
• 300 GB WD HDD
• GeForce 280 GTX
• Power supply: BFG 1200W.

Core 2 Quad QX9770 XE processor @ 60% Fan RPM

For our test we are going to look at the cooling performance in three setups. Our processor is a beefy one, as it's the 1600 MHz FSB based quad core QX 9770 (Extreme Edition). By itself the processor runs quite hot due to it's 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
• Processor clocks at 4000 MHZ / Processor voltage 1.6v

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, even with a processor overclock at 3600 MHz at 1.4 volts when we stress all four CPU cores, we max out at roughly 60 Degrees C / 140 F. That really is pretty okay for a heatpipe based cooler. Remember, this is overclocked at 3600 MHz.

4000 MHz however (at 1.6v) is a big no-go. We have yet to find an air cooler which can cope with a 4000 MHz processor overclock @ 1.6 Volts though :)

Sound levels

• The DBa noise level readings at 60% are 38 DBa coming from the PC. As such the cooler is really silent.
• Once it passes 80% fan RPM you'll start to hear it as it becomes more noisy, we ended up at 42 DBa, which is still fine really.

Competitive chart

Here we can compare the cooler to all other coolers we've recently tested. This test is done with a 3600 MHz QX9770 processor with 1.4 volts jammed into the CPU. For all coolers, the fans are locked at 60% fan rotation.

As you can see the Titan TTC-NK85TZ Fenrir is holding ground fairly well at 60 Degrees C / 140 F.

While it's definitely not 'uber' high-end, it can surely compete with the rest of the coolers out there really well. The good thing is, it does that at very nice sound levels, as mentioned in the previous paragraph.