Torture Test!

With the installation out of the way and the card back in the system and running great. Its time to test it out and see if the SPC1 will actually cool the 8500 more effecient than the stock cooler. We'll also see if the overclockablility of this particular 8500 increases any with better cooling.

A Compunurse probe was placed on the back side of the PCB right where the GPU is at. Temps were taken with the stock cooling and with the SPC1 installed. The system was booted up and temps were taken 15 minutes after a cold boot on windows desktop. And then 3DMark2K1SE was looped for 2 rounds and the highest temp that was reached while running that was also recorded. Room temp was held at 26C for testing.

As you can see the SPC1 definately cools the 8500 a lot better than the stock cooler does. Now as far as overclocking goes... I was only able to achieve 293Mhz on the GPU with the SPC1. With the stock cooler highest I could reach without artifacts was 290. Given this I believe this 8500 just isn't cut out for overclocking. I did however gain 3Mhz which didn't make a whole lot of difference but I was shooting to get higher and I did. Wasn't as high as I was shooting for but hey i'm not going to complain!

The SPC1 definately does its job. I really like the way it looks topped with its low Profile. It only sits at 12.7mm tall vs 25mm of the Blue Orb. It topped the stock 8500 cooling so it can't be all that bad can it? On the down side though the only things I didn't care for was the wire length and the power connecter. The wires were just long enough to plug back into the 8500. I doubt this would cause many problem with the card but I'd feel safer if it used a 3 pin molex connector so it could be hooked up to a motherboard header, and also could be used on a lot more applications if it used a 3 pin molex. Other than those 2 minor things I found the SPC1 to be not only affective but also very cool looking! Will go great with all the blue cables in my case! The SPC1 will also do well to replace a motherboards chipset cooling, mainly those that have just a simple and small heatsink and/or with a small fan.

Thanks goes out to Dynatron for sending us this fine chipset cooler!

< Previous Page