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Twenty Five Intel CPU Coolers Tested

Posted by CowboyNeal on Sat Jun 02, 2007 11:50 AM
from the unseasonably-warm-this-year dept.
Intel Hardware
Kez writes "Over recent years coolers have grown increasingly exotic in design, striving for good cooling performance and low noise even with the most power hungry of CPUs. But sometimes that comes at a price, be it straining the motherboard's socket to its limit, or the wallets of PC enthusiasts. Investigating which coolers do their job well without snapping your motherboard in two, HEXUS.net reviews 25 LGA775 coolers."
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Twenty Five Intel CPU Coolers Tested 50 Comments More /

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  • I have found... (Score:5, Funny)

    by mulvane (692631) on Saturday June 02 2007, @11:57AM (#19363955)
    That the most effective (and costly), is sticking my wife on my processor. Her icy cold personality towards my computers has allowed me to reach near 0 Kelvin on many over clocked processor lines.
    • That the most effective (and costly), is sticking my wife on my processor. Her icy cold personality towards my computers has allowed me to reach near 0 Kelvin on many over clocked processor lines.

      And thanks to that dual core Prescott processor, she sure has a hot ass!

  • wow what a spammy site (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 02 2007, @12:01PM (#19363997)

    i have seen less adverts on a domain squatters site, running a website must be really expensive if you have to be that desperate to plaster the page with 20+ adverts per page (from multiple advert servers) and as a result create a page that is over 400kb of tracking/advert scripts and images when the actual content you read is about 1kb

    i guess dignity has no place on that site, or this one for that matter for linking to such a pathetic excuse for a website

  • Aftermarket coolers are useless for most users. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Spazntwich (208070) on Saturday June 02 2007, @12:03PM (#19364019)
    When was the last time a CPU failed at stock speed with the stock cooler?

    The obsession with aftermarket cooling solutions for all but the harder core overclockers strikes me as about as ridiculous as engine oil companies' claims of their oil increasing engine life over other oils. When was the last time you heard about an engine seizing that didn't straight-up run out of oil or suffer from a factory error?

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Netsplitter (983360)
      A lot more people are aiming to have silent computers nowadays. While the cooling capabilities may suffice, they are very loud. Personally, I can't understand how anyone can be in the same room with the sound of a stock cooler, let alone try to sleep in the same room with one.
      • Do you have any numbers for decibel ratings on more recent stock coolers and some aftermarket ones? I haven't been in the overclocking scene for a few years, but back then stock coolers were among the quietest available, short of going with the huge Zalman's.
      • Personally, I can't understand how anyone can be in the same room with the sound of a stock cooler, let alone try to sleep in the same room with one.

        Speak for yourself. I actually can't sleep with my PC turned off. I'm so used to the noise of the fans, that if exposed to complete silence I immediately get paranoias that someone's coming to get me and someone's watching me.

        But that nothing compared to the noise in my ears I hear without fan noise, from all the long ears of exposure to loud music.

        If anything,
    • I agree that some people make an obsession out of squeezing the most OCing or cooling out of their computers. Normal people like me, however, like to have a silent computer and you just can't compare something like a Zalman to a stock cooler, noisewise. Besides, it looks good in my windowed case at LAN parties :)
    • Maybe I just had a slightly defective unit or something, but the stock cooler on my Intel CPU (Celeron D 351 3.20GHz) would routinely idle around 50 C or so, and hit 70 degrees C or higher under load, even running an ancient game like Starcraft - my fans would rev up high enough to sound like jet engines.

      In contrast, I swapped it out with one of the reviewed coolers (the Arctic 7 Freezer Pro), and I see at least a 10 degree difference (or more) in pretty much everything i've run since then.
    • If you look at the prices for Core 2 Duos [newegg.com], the difference between something like the E6600 and the X6800 is $750. Slap a $50 cooler on the E6600, clock it up to 3.2 GHz easily (~3.6 GHz max on air) and you have a CPU that performs better than one that would have cost you $700 more. You'd have to be kinda crazy not to overclock the Core 2 Duos.

      You're right that most users don't, but they should. It's a worthy investment.
      • Overclocking isn't exactly easy. When I try to overclock my core 2 duo it just doesn't start up. It's not something anyone can do.
        • Some boards, such as my Asus P5W DH Deluxe have different ways to overclock, some of which are absurdly simple, such as "overclock 30%". By looking at the values it used, and a quick google search, it didn't take me long to figure out how to overclock to much faster speeds with the manual settings. (The problem I had at first was setting my memory far too fast and making the system crash. By setting it to ~800 mhz, I got my processor stable at 3.5GHz easily.)
    • In the last three years, the machine under my desk at work has had its CPU replaced once, and motherboard replaced four times due to fan failures. It's a machine built with salvaged parts, but the CPU is a 1.3GHz Athlon, so they're not exactly ancient. All of these were stock fans, supplied by the lowest bidder.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Kamokazi (1080091)
      You're somewhat right.

      But that article is not targeted at most users. It's targeted at geeks like us, who want either:

      a) A quiter PC
      b) A PC that will last longer because their components ran cooler
      c) People who stress their CPUs a lot and want to ensure they are not going to die prematurely (gamers and powerusers).
      d) Overclockers

      Also, why are datacenters and server rooms often air conditioned to well below room temperature? Longer life, true, but also better stability. See how long you can run Prime95 on
    • Its a real thing.

      Under certain conditions, the motor oil in your car can literally cook itself into a solid, and stop lubricating an engine.

      If you are lucky, your radiator overheats before you blow a gasket separating oil from water. Get water into a place where oil goes and all kinds of things can go wrong.

      The answer? Synthetic oil only. It does prolong engine life, especially in older cars with lots of miles on them. No matter how hot they get, they dont cook off and stop lubricating an engine. Also

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by raw-sewage (679226)

      When was the last time a CPU failed at stock speed with the stock cooler? The obsession with aftermarket cooling solutions for all but the harder core overclockers strikes me as about as ridiculous as engine oil companies' claims of their oil increasing engine life over other oils. When was the last time you heard about an engine seizing that didn't straight-up run out of oil or suffer from a factory error?

      True, but some people (such as myself) have a different/additional obsession: silent computing [silentpcreview.com]. St

    • My old box: Athlon 2600+, Palomino core. Running Folding@home for a few days (in Linux) and it rebooted. This was a repeatable behavior and stopped when I quit folding.

      It was Debian, so not likely that an OS fault would crash the system.
    • Aftermarket coolers are useless for most users.

      And how many those "most users" read Slashdot or Hexus?
    • I agree, and even as for noise levels, my stock cooler this time (with the Core 2 Duo E6600 package) was surprisingly quiet, especially with the noise padding I had installed into the case since earlier for an overall reduction.

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by 427_ci_505 (1009677)
        I'm pretty sure they're using the same amount of power, but just getting rid of wasted heat better. I might be wrong. Does a cooler chip need less power to do a certain action than the same chip running warm?
        • Even if it does, the swing can't be more than a few watts in either direction.

          Otherwise, Intel and AMD would release power usage under load numbers for various temperatures, and people constructing server centers would take that into account with their air conditioning decisions.

  • Ad revenu (Score:3)

    by RpiMatty (834853) on Saturday June 02 2007, @12:07PM (#19364053)
    Exec 1: So how do we fit 1 million ads into a review?
    Exec 2: 25 products with 4 pages each?
    Exec 1: BRILLIANT!

  • The Zalman CNPS series is nice (Score:3, Informative)

    by bcmm (768152) on Saturday June 02 2007, @12:10PM (#19364069)
    I have a CNPS7700-AlCu. It's a cheaper one than the one they review - and also smaller. The piece of metal with the vanes sits straight on the CPU with no heat pipes or anything. What they don't mention is that even my smaller cooler is technically out-of-spec - they're heavier than a LGA775 cooler should be, but motherboards don't actually snap that easily.

    Anyway, the cooler comes with a device for adjusting it's speed, and it is practically silent on the lowest setting while still providing pretty good cooling. It helps that my processor isn't a very hot one (Intel Core 2 Duo 6300), but even on the silent setting I cannot make it go over 49 C. In fact, the vanes have enough surface area that if it's a cold day, the cooler works fine disconnected, i.e. without the fan turning.

    As they say, fitting it can be a pain, but that is presumably the price you pay for fitting some 700g of copper on the motherboard.

    By the way, it's worth taking measurements or checking their list of supported motherboards - it's physical dimensions are beyond the LGA775 spec as well. It extends out over the components immediately surrounding the CPU, and on my motherboard it neatly blows air through the northbridge and GPU heatsinks.
    • Link to the 7700-AlCu [newegg.com] you mentioned.

      I have the 9700 NT [newegg.com]. Like you, I was concerned with the huge size and weight of some of the towers. The Zalmans provide most of the benefit of the towers (performance, "silent"), while weighing in much closer to spec. They also include the fan, rather than some of the towers where you attach a 120 mm. That can be good or bad depending on whether you wanted to install your own quiet fan.

      The difference between the 9700 LED that they reviewed and the 9700 NT that I own is pri
      • The 7700 has a somewhat strange way of controlling fan speed. Irritatingly, it cannot be controlled through software like some fans, but instead has a little box with a variable resistor adjustable by a little knob, with an adhesive patch to mount it outside the case. Maybe it's because it's harder to silence a pulse width modulated fan than one which is regulated by a constant voltage.

  • Something weird with their testing methodology (Score:3, Informative)

    by A Friendly Troll (1017492) on Saturday June 02 2007, @12:10PM (#19364071)
    Some really, really great coolers, like the Noctua U12 or the Ultra 120 Extreme, don't fare very well on their test.

    Also, if you haven't noticed, there's no word about fan noise... Which is extremely important to a lot of people. What good is a couple of degrees difference between cooler A and cooler B, if the latter includes a 4000 fan that sounds like a jet engine while the former is inaudible in a closed case?

    Look [silentpcreview.com] elsewhere [madshrimps.be] if you want to read proper articles about the subject.

    • Also, if you haven't noticed, there's no word about fan noise... Which is extremely important to a lot of people. What good is a couple of degrees difference between cooler A and cooler B, if the latter includes a 4000 fan that sounds like a jet engine while the former is inaudible in a closed case?

      I posted a comment to that effect on their forum. A staff member replied [hexus.net]:

      Had the guys done noise, something else would have had to drop.

      Luckily they found the time to rate the packaging [hexus.net] the coolers came in.

    • I have a Scythe Ninja B because of reviews I read on silent pc sites. I have to say its very quiet indeed, and I have to put my ear close to the case hear anything going on. My temps for cpu are also much lower than with noisey stock cooler. I overclocked an E6600 to 3.0 and considered it a waste of time for my uses and went back to specs (it takes less than 5 minutes to get it to 3.0 again if I was going to be encoding or something for awhile). Having abandoned overclocking, I would still get one of these

  • You might be a loser if...... (Score:5, Funny)

    by LibertineR (591918) on Saturday June 02 2007, @12:17PM (#19364127)
    1. You use water cooling on your computer, and have friends with whom you regularly compare operating temps.

    2. You rearrainge your workspace to see the built-in temperature guage no matter where you are.

    3. You have a variable speed control for the fan on your power supply, and adjust it based on weather conditions.

    4. You believe that the fan on top of your workstation blowing out actually does anything worthy of the added cost.

    5. Your workspace sounds like a 747 on approach because of all the fans in your workstation.

    Nobody ever got laid over their ability to keep their computer cool. Cool is out, QUIET is in, bitches.

      • I am overclocked with passive gear, but I used to be one of those 9-fan fools. Silent fans, psu, etc. No problems except maybe after an hour in Call of Duty with all the settings maxed out. And yeah, my psu has a variable speed control, but I just dont talk about it.

        I just dont want to reach a point where I know more about cooling down a computer, than about warming up a vagina. Ya dig?

          • First, computers are NOT my hobby.

            I USE computers to make money helping Corporations USE computers to do business.

            We could just as easily be discussing which oil to use to keep a pipe wrench from squeaking. Would that make using pipe wrenches a hobby?

            Look, I just think we take these things a bit too seriously. Whether playing a game, or writing a proposal, a computer is just a means to an end, and something we should not become so enamored with that we blow good money after bad ideas, like nuts who pu

  • Online "magazines" are going nuts (Score:5, Insightful)

    by syylk (538519) on Saturday June 02 2007, @12:17PM (#19364131) Homepage
    Ok, all nice and cute... ...But ONE HUNDRED AND NINETEEN pages to describe CPU coolers?

    I mean, WTF? Next time, just put one word per page, alongside 29763410974 banners/links/ads and be done with it. This kind of... err... "journalism" is spiraling down. Quickly.

    I know I will miss some incredibly useful piece of vital information by avoiding to read all 119 pages. But I also know there are more creative ways to offend my own intelligence.

    • Ok, all nice and cute... ...But ONE HUNDRED AND NINETEEN pages to describe CPU coolers?

      Two sentences per page with the rest being ads... Any decent story would be that long at least...

    • This is partly why I don't visit "hardware enthusiast" sites. If you visit one, you'll probably find about five menubars, maybe two to the top, one to each side, one on the bottom, as well as ads. I much prefer the format of a paper magazine - there is one index per issue, paper magazines didn't try to put an index on every page, and every ten words is double underlined and bolded so you can click to get an ad that's out of context with the word in question! It's impossible to overstate that the vision o
  • 25 CPU coolers on your machine - that's got to be a chilly box... Add a beer compartment?

  • Page 115 (Score:3, Insightful)

    by $RANDOMLUSER (804576) on Saturday June 02 2007, @12:56PM (#19364429)
    The graph for CPU temp under load - my question is, if you're an aftermarket cooler maker, and you can't even beat the Intel stock cooler, why exactly did you go to market?
    • Most poeple don't even get to the first page of the article, and you got to page 115? Well done Sir!

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Mr EdgEy (983285)
      Some people buy OEM to save cash, and a cheap cooler helps them with that

    • Noise (Score:3, Informative)

      by joeflies (529536)
      One is a passively cooled sink, so if you're not concerned about the few degrees centigrade difference, but are majorly concerned about noise, you can get a passively cooled one that doesn't cool as well as stock sink, but it also has no fan.
    • The graph for CPU temp under load - my question is, if you're an aftermarket cooler maker, and you can't even beat the Intel stock cooler, why exactly did you go to market?

      Perhaps to provide a quieter cooler than the stock one, which isn't exactly quiet? I don't overclock, and I really don't care what temperature the CPU is at so long as it's still within specs and stable. I do care about noise though.

  • Review packaging but not noise? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by btempleton (149110) on Saturday June 02 2007, @01:52PM (#19364849) Homepage
    I mean it just seems to me to be ridiculous to have detailed review of the packaging of all these coolers, and to pick a winner on something we'll throw out, but not to measure one of the most important factors in choosing a cooler -- noise levels.

    I just can't fathom why the packaging review, it makes me suspect the motives of the whole thing.

  • What about dust? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by justthinkit (954982) <floyd@just-think-it.com> on Saturday June 02 2007, @02:27PM (#19365079) Homepage Journal
    I've have a (sucky) Dell desktop and when it is clean inside it runs quietly, even at 100% CPU load. Then as the days go by and the dog scratches his derriere repeatedly the fan noise rises. After about 10 days to two weeks I have to shut it down, vacuum it thoroughly inside and it is quiet once again.

    So, how do these coolers perform with some dust in them? That is the cooler I want for the increased uptime.

  • Frustratingly misguided (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Gordo_1 (256312) on Saturday June 02 2007, @02:32PM (#19365113)
    Ok, why would anyone spend $50+ to buy one of these monstrosities? Two reasons:

    1. You want safe overclocked performance from the latest Core2Duo processors
    2. You want a 'quiet' CPU cooling solution

    This review utterly failed to achieve either end-user goal because they failed to even attempt to control variables, among other problems. Instead they:

    1. Completely ignored noise as an issue. Sure the winning heatsink has huge heat pipes and all, but does its built-in fan sound like a jet engine to achieve its mark?
    2. Did not standardize on a single 3rd-party fan to control for the huge variance in quality from one manufacturer to another.
    3. Did not standardize on a single high performance thermal compound, but rather used whatever cheap goo each manufacturer stuck in the box.
    4. No indication whether any of the extra cooling performance achieved by the top sinks actually has any positive effect on overclockability (aside from noise, the only other reason why you might reasonably consider one of these heatsinks). Many overclockers fail to achieve >50% overclocks of Core2Duo due to voltage regulation, memory or chipset cooling issues, independent of CPU cooling. For example, if your motherboard can't maintain a consistent voltage for the CPU under load, it doesn't matter that your heatsink achieves -270 degrees Kelvin.

    So, in summary, all I've found out is which retail combination keeps my CPU coolest, irregardless of noise and whether the extra cooling performance actually matters. Hmmmm...great. IMHO, if you need to buy one of these things (like I did a while back) do yourself a favor and go read http://www.silentpcreview.com/ [silentpcreview.com] . They're a lot more scientific about their methodology.

    Disclaimer: I do not and have not ever worked for, nor do I know anyone who works for SilentPCReview, I just happen to think their testing methods suck a lot less.
  • You greatly reduce the noise production by, twice every year, wiping all dust off the cooler-fans and fan-blades (especially onderneath where it's hard to reach) with a toothbrush (not your own).

    You 'll be surprised.
  • i feel sorry for the reviewer, what a moron, comparing coolers using different fans is pretty much useless. you can make almost any of the heatsinks listed either a super quite poor performer, or a jet engine sounding super cooling machine, all by changing the fan. whats more, not including dB measurements in a review of HSFs today is laughable, whats the point.

    the real measurement of a heatsink by most enthusiasts standards today lies in a perfect balance of cooling+silence, do yourself a favor and read

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