System Testing
The Koolance Exos-2 external liquid cooling system was tested on an Athlon 64 3200+ test rig consisting of the components listed below. The ambient room air temperature was maintained at 24°C ±0.5°C. The CPU was loaded by running Folding@Home 24/7 and the GPU was loaded by running continuous loops of 3Dmark 2001SE. Several dozen temperature reading were recorded and averaged over 2~3 days for each condition and mounting. The Exos-2 was tested with and without the GPU block installed and with the fans running at four different speeds (#10, #7, #4, and #1).
- Sunbeam Trio mid-tower case
- Asus K8N-E Deluxe nForce3-250 motherboard
- AMD Athlon 64 3200+ (0.13 µm
- Seasonic SuperTornado 400 watt ATX power supply
- (2) Corsair CMX512-3200C2 DDR RAM
- ATI Radeon 9800 Pro
- WD800JB IDE HDD
- Sony 16X DVD, FDD
- Windows XP Pro with SP2
To facilitate taking accurate CPU temperature measurements I attached a very small Omega thermocouple to the side of the Athlon 64 IHS with Arctic Alumina thermal epoxy. The measurement equipment used during testing included:
- CPU/IHS — Barnant Model 115 digital thermometer (accuracy +/- 0.4º C)
- Ambient air — Barnant Model 115 digital thermometer (accuracy +/- 0.4º C)
- Extech Model 407736 digital sound level meter (accuracy +/- 1.5 dB)
The following data is presented for comparative purposes only. Your actual results may be different depending on the variables unique to your system (CPU, overclock, ambient temperature, case air flow, temperature monitoring, etc).
CPU — Temperature reported by Asus PC Probe utility (internal diode)
Tc — Temperature obtained with calibrated thermocouple attached to IHS
Delta T — Fully loaded Tc temperature rise above ambient
dBA — Sound pressure level recorded 3′ away (background ~30 dBA)
For comparison, I also included the results from three other water-cooling kits (Koolance ICM-505 internal liquid cooling system, Corsair COOL and Cooler Master Aquagate Mini R120) and two air-cooled heatsinks (Thermalright XP-120 HSF with 120mm Panaflo L1A and 120mm Delta SHE, and the stock OEM aluminum HSF that comes bundled with the Athlon 64 3200+). All cooling systems were tested on the same CPU under the same conditions.
As you can see, the Exos-2 liquid cooling system did a very good job of cooling the A64 3200+ processor. With the radiator fans set on high (#10) the average CPU temperature (IHS temperature) was less than 5°C over ambient when the Exos-2 was cooling just the CPU. Adding the video card cooler into the mix only increased the CPU temperature by about 1~2°C. However, with the two fans running at high speed, the fan noise was very noticeable. Slowing the fans down quickly reduced the noise and at the lowest setting (#1) the Exos-2 was virtually silent.
I used ATITool to monitor the video card temperatures using the onboard sensors. Temperature measurements were taken at the same four fan speeds as was used during the CPU only tests. For comparison I also included the temperatures obtained while using the Arctic Cooling VGA Silencer Rev.3 at both its high and low fan speed settings.
As with the CPU cooler, the Koolance video card waterblock also did an excellent job of keeping the GPU relatively cool. In fact it did better than the very respectable VGA Silencer; one of the better video card air coolers.
