Performance

Now its time for some testing. Temperatures will be taken at idle 15 min after a fresh boot. Load temperatures will be taken after 30 minutes of Running Folding@Home. Temperatures were taken with Epox's very own system monitor. Room temperature was maintained at a steady 74F for testing. System specs are as follows...

• AMD XP 1600+ AROIA-Y
• Epox 8K3A+
• 512 Megs of Samsung Pc2700
• Western Digtial SE 120 Gig
• ATI Radeon 8500
• Hercules GTXP
• Arctic Alumina thermal compound

As most probably know, but for those of you who don't, the 8K3A+ reads the temps of the AMD XP's from the internal thermistor. Because of this the temps may seem a little on the high side. But its nothing to worry about. It is a more accurate way to read the temps than by reading from behind the chip as done on most pre-kt333 boards.

Well there you have it. As you can see from the temperatures this cooler is in no way meant for overclocking. This particular chip I was using will run 1.9 Gig but I was unable to get it to run at that speed for very long. I have the CPU Temp warning set to kick in at 70C and shutdown at 75C and well it would shut down after about 10 seconds of F@H. So I just overclocked to where I could get it to run stable. I can say that I wasn't the least bit impressed with this. But with what we're doing this HSF was not designed to do.

I however really liked a few aspects of this cooler. The clip design was very well thought out and affective. The decible level was another! The fan is rated at 20dBa so it is virtually "Silent". This cooler was mainly designed for your average everyday PC user who wants quiet and decent cooling. If that is what your looking for then this is the cooler for you. However, if your like myself you want to abuse your computer as much as possible this isn't a good solution for you.

Thanks goes out to Arctic Cooling for sending us this cooler for review.