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Alpine 7 Pro

David Murphy — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 14:00:00 -0500

Given its small size, we didn’t expect maximum cooling performance from Arctic Cooling’s Alpine 7 Pro. And while the Alpine 7 Pro doesn’t set any performance records, in some situations it does match the capabilities of our cooler of choice, Thermaltake’s DuOrb. Given the sheer size difference between this 9x9x3cm cooler and the, well, monstrous DuOrb, the Alpine 7’s performance was a pleasant surprise.

The Alpine 7 Pro does an exceptional job of cooling when your processor is idle—it even ran head to head with the DuOrb in this capacity. Both coolers dropped the temperature of all four cores of our Q6700 to 36 C, but when we cranked up our processor to 100 percent usage rates, the Alpine 7 faltered.

As always, our burn-in test separated the lion from the lamb. The DuOrb is reasonably quiet and provides flawless cooling. The Alpine 7 Pro’s attached 9.2cm fan is similarly silent—far less audible than a beastly cooling apparatus like the Zalman CNPS9700. It just doesn’t cool as well. We appreciate the Alpine 7 Pro’s ability to offer better cooling than a stock Intel cooler, but as we expected from the get-go, this is not a high-performance cooler.

The cooler supports the Intel LGA775 spec to a T. Prior to this, we had never tested a cooler that included all four installation prongs that Intel stock coolers have. The inclusion of these prongs eliminates the need to remove the motherboard to install the cooler. It’s a welcome relief from a tiresome process that we could really do without. All air coolers that fit an LGA775 motherboard should come with a four-prong mounting system—period.

Overclockers might want to steer clear of the Alpine in favor of a bulkier cooler, but the Alpine 7 Pro’s smidgen of additional cooling over a stock part and superlow price make it a fantastic value.

Thermaltake DuOrb

David Murphy — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 12:33:33 -0500

Zalman’s CNPS9700 has been the Godzilla of coolers and a Best of the Best champion for more than a year. But it’s finally facing its Megalon in Thermaltake’s DuOrb cooler. Unlike the CNPS9700, which has an 11cm fan strapped to the side of its imposing copper and aluminum frame, the DuOrb’s heatsinks are stretched out horizontally. The extra-wide cooler, shaped in a 20-centimeter-wide figure eight, comes with two 8cm blue and red LED fans tucked inside two rings of copper fins.

The design is certainly unique, but we dislike the look of the red-blue fan combination. It’s a slap in the face of case aesthetics. We’d much rather see no LED fans at all than this mismatched lighting pattern.

We’re used to seeing coolers get taller and taller, and there’s a good reason for this—there aren’t any components above your CPU that could get in the way. Thermaltake’s horizontal expansion could prove troublesome for enthusiast builders. Install the cooler one way and you’re blocking (albeit also cooling) your RAM slots. Install it the other way and you might block a PCI Express slot.

But there’s something to be said for this cooler’s girth. The extra pudge and dual-fan design allow the DuOrb to match the CNPS9700 degree for degree in the cooling race. We recorded results within one degree of each other in both our idle and CPU burn tests—and the DuOrb uses less air power to achieve this parity. Since two fans split the cooling workload, the DuOrb runs much more quietly than the CNPS9700.

We’ve installed Zalman’s cooler dozens of times, and we’re still bothered each and every time we have to attach a screw to the device’s retention plate. By contrast, the DuOrb’s installation—which still requires motherboard removal—entails no heaving or straining to mount the cooler overtop our CPU.

While this device certainly trounces the Zalman in noise level and installation, our apprehensions about the cooler’s size keep the DuOrb out of our hall of fame. We don’t mind that the DuOrb will make upgrading our rig more challenging, but not everyone will be so forgiving

Gigabyte 3D Rocket II

Dävïd Mürphy — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 19:37:34 -0600

Let nobody say that Gigabyte didn’t break the mold with its 3D Rocket II heatsink/fan combination. As the name alludes, the device resembles a rocket ship sitting atop a launch pad. It’s about as well strapped in, too; we applaud the 3D Rocket II for its efforts to sail amongst the heavenly stars of CPU coolers, but its installation process keeps the device strapped firmly to the ground.

We first tried to mount the cooler in our old FX-60 test bed, a relatively painless procedure given how nicely the cooler’s single retention bar snaps into the motherboard’s mounting mechanism. However, the pressure the cooler placed on the CPU caused our motherboard not to post. The damage, though, wasn’t permanent. Everything worked perfectly after we swapped out the 3D Rocket II for a stock AMD cooler.

Installing the cooler on our new Intel Q6700-based test bed forced us to remove the motherboard to install Gigabyte’s mounting bracket. We were worried about possibly breaking our CPU by having to push down on the cooler’s two retention bars, but the machine posted and gave us results comparable to those of our current air-cooling champion.

The tall cooler barely fits in most cases, forcing you to remove the optional air duct attached to its fan. But that doesn’t trouble us nearly as much as the possibility that the 3D Rocket II could grind our processors into dust. Anxiety is the last thing we want in an aftermarket CPU cooler.

Coolink Silentator

David Murphy — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 13:46:56 -0500

We’re always suspicious of cooling devices that promote their silent functionality. Quiet devices tend to use less-powerful fans or run normal fans at painfully slow speeds. And while this can do wonders for one’s hearing and general peace of mind, our reasonably noisy stock AMD cooler performs much better than the quieter devices we’ve tested.

So when a cooler comes in with the word “silent” right in its name, you can understand our skepticism regarding the product’s potential for heat removal. But Coolink’s Silentator CPU cooler survived a thorough round of Maximum PC heat testing. Better still, it outperformed our low expectations to establish itself as a solid cooling option. The Zalman CNPS9700 still retains its title as our cooling champion, but we wouldn’t mind strapping the Silentator into one of our rigs as a second option.

Installing the Silentator isn’t the most challenging process, though it is rather involved. We had to remove the cooler’s fan just to mount the cooler onto our FX-60, which isn’t a huge problem, but it definitely adds time to the process. You can, however, adjust the cooler’s direction so that air flows either horizontally or vertically, a nice touch.

We were more willing to stomach the installation after seeing the Silentator’s performance. In fact, we even reran the benchmarks to ensure that there wasn’t anything funny going on with the test rig. But the Silentator’s score held true; the Zalman is still The Hulk of cooling power, but we’d let the Silentator into our secret superhero club any day. It cools nicely, with the added bonus of being far, far quieter than the “Rock You Like a Hurricane” Zalman cooler.

The Silentator will never be as awesome as its noisy neighbors, but it balances cacophony and cooling quite nicely.

Thermaltake Big Typhoon VX

David Murphy — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 14:14:23 -0500

It’s hard to look at Thermaltake’s Big Typhoon VX cooler and not think one of two things: the most horrific joke you can make about size mattering and the current market price of the Dremel you’ll need to cut a hole in your case to make room for this Godzilla of a cooler.

We kid, but only a little. The cooler’s 10.3 centimeters of bulky height already makes it quite a space-filler in your rig, but the Big Typhoon’s size is amplified by the chunky 12cm fan that rests on top of the device’s six heat pipes. Strapping this sucker to a CPU reminds us of those times in SimCity when we would flatten some poor Joe’s house to make way for the Eiffel Tower or something equally grand.

But there’s nothing to joke about when it comes to the Big Typhoon’s performance. It sucks a serious amount of heat from your processor, joining the ranks of our ever-favorite Zalman CNPS9700 as one of the best air coolers we’ve tested. While the baseline temperature of our stock cooler varied during the testing of the CNPS9700 and the Big Typhoon, both devices cooled our FX-60 by near-identical amounts during our burn test—about 12C. To its credit, the Big Typhoon also comes with a fan-speed adjuster. And even at its lowest setting, the device still does an amazing job. We don’t often see quiet-mode coolers beating our processor’s default stock cooler. Usually when we lower fan speeds to a silent setting, processor temperatures go up, not down.

But getting this cooler on the CPU is the real treat. Snapping the single clip across the device’s base takes all of 10 seconds, easily the fastest installation of any air cooler we’ve seen. Were it a bit less bulky, the Big Typhoon VX would be gusting its way to a Kick Ass for sure.