System Testing
The Nautilus500 external water cooling system was tested on an Athlon 64 3200+ test rig consisting of the components listed below. Testing a complete water cooling system on a real CPU is much more meaningful than testing only the waterblock because it is the sum of all the parts that determines overall performance.
The ambient room air temperature was maintained at 24°C ±0.5°C. The CPU was loaded by running Folding@Home 24/7. Several dozen temperature reading were recorded and averaged over 2~3 days for each of five test mountings. The system was tested with the 120mm radiator fan running at both High and Low speed.
- Asus K8N-E Deluxe nForce3-250 motherboard
- AMD Athlon 64 3200+ (0.13 µm Newcastle core)
- 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 for the Corsair COOL, Koolance Exos2, Koolance ICM-505, Cooler Master Aquagate Mini R120, a 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 Nautilus500 external water cooling kit from Corsair did an excellent job of cooling the A64 3200+ processor. With the fan set to High speed the noise level was obvious but not overbearing. Switching the radiator fan to Low speed only made the noise level slightly quieter (still far from silent), which I found surprising. There seems to be noticeable pump noise resonating from the plastic enclosure, even though the pump is isolated with foam tape.
Cooling performance only decreased a little over one degree when the fan was switched to Low speed. The SpeedFan utility showed the cooling fan running at 1,795 RPM (High) and 1,259 RPM (Low).
