Testing – Intel
The second set of tests was conducted on a red-hot Pentium 4 EE based test rig consisting of the components listed below. The ambient room air temperature was again maintained at 23°C ±0.5°C. Four instances of CPUBurn were executed at the same time (two to load both physical cores, and two to load the two virtual HyperThreading cores), which resulted in 100% CPU usage.
Test Rig Configuration
- Asus P5N32-SLI Deluxe motherboard
- Pentium 4 Extreme Edition dual core 955 @ 3.46 GHz
- (2) Corsair CM2X512-8000UL DDR2
- (2) nVIDIA 7800 GTX 512 MB video cards in SLI
- Western Digital WD1200JD S-ATA HDD
- SilverStone Zeus ST75ZF 750W PSU
- Windows XP Pro with SP2
- nVIDIA 91.31 nForce driver
Tests were conducted using the cooler’s integrated variable speed fan (at three different speed settings) and a Nexus 120mm silent fan.
- Everflow F121225SM: 0.25A, 2,000 rpm, 86.5 CFM, 34 dBA at 12V
- Nexus D12SL-12: 0.30A, 1,000 rpm, 36.9 CFM, 22.8 dBA at 12V
Just like on the Athlon64 CPU, a small Omega thermocouple is attached to the side of the 955 IHS with Arctic Alumina thermal epoxy. The measurement equipment used during this phase of 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)
Software Utilities
- Lavalys Everest Ultimate Edition 2006 (hardware monitoring)
- Asus PC Probe II (hardware monitoring)
- CPUBurn (load the CPU)
For comparison, I included the results from two other popular HSFs for LGA775 platform. All HSFs were tested on the same EE 955 CPU under the same conditions.
- XP-120 with Antec TriCool 3-speed fan
- Ultra-120 with Antec TriCool 3-speed fan
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).
Amb — Ambient room air temperature
CPU — Temperature reported by Everest utility (internal diode)
Tc — Temperature obtained with calibrated thermocouple attached to 955 IHS
∆T — Fully loaded Tc temperature rise above ambient temperature
CPU — Temperature reported by Asus PC Probe II utility
Note: My original P5N32-SLI Deluxe motherboard died awhile back and the CPU temperature reported by the replacement board is so far off (~20°C) its not worth reporting — thank goodness for the thermocouple attached to the 955 IHS.
Once again, the Thermaltake Big Typhoon VX did an excellent job of keeping the fully loaded CPU cool — even the red-hot EE 955. And again, it was very close to delivering the same level of cooling performance to noise as the Ultra-120. When operating at High speed (2,000 rpm) the fan noise was definately noticeable. Using the built-in fan speed controller to slow the fan down quickly reduced the noise and at Low speed (1,250 rpm) it was acceptably quiet and yet still delivered very good cooling performance. Swapping out the Thermaltake variable speed fan for the virtually silent Nexus 120mm fan still provided very good cooling.
