X-bit labs

Titan Vanessa S & L-Type and Thermaltake Big Typhoon vs. Zalman CNPS9500 LED

Category: Coolers

by Sergey Lepilov

[ 09/07/2005 | 04:17 PM ]

Witness the race of four powerful cooling solutions from Titan, Thermaltake and Zalman in our new round of tests. Find out if the newcomer from Zalman with its unique heatsink design can compete with the rivals.

Table of contents:

• Testing Participants
  
• Titan Vanessa S-Type (NK15TB/SC (RB))
  
• Titan Vanessa L-Type (NK25TB/SC (RB))
  
• Thermaltake Big Typhoon (CL-P0114)
  
• Technical Specifications
  
• Testbed and Methods
  
• Performance Results in a Closed Testbed
  
• Performance Results in an Open Testbed
  
• Conclusion
  

The heat dissipation of contemporary processors increases with the release of every new model. The cooling solutions for the new CPUs also tend to become more and more sophisticated, because the cooling requirements grow almost linearly, and the use of heatpipe technology has nearly turned into a de-facto standard already. As of today, almost every well-known CPU cooler manufacturer offers solutions based on heatpipe technology. Among them are the systems from Gigabyte, ASUS, CoolerMaster, Scythe and many others have already been reviews on our site. And even the aluminum guru, GlacialTech Company, released their Igloo 5600PWM cooler (although only for LGA775 processors yet), which is also built around heatpipe technology.

At the same time there is a lot of discussion going on about the today’s most efficient cooling solutions, including those using heatpipes. We have got a lot of requests from you, our readers, to gather all the cooling monsters together for a single test session, so that we could finally single out the winner.

I would like to point out right away that at this point we are not planning a large-scale testing session like that, however, we are going to introduce to you three very interesting representatives of the cooling systems of this type and compare their characteristics and performance against the results of the recently reviews Zalman CNPS9500 LED (for more details check out our review called First Look at Zalman CNPS9500 LED: the Power of Air, the Efficiency of Water ). We will also include the results of a reference boxed cooler for AMD Athlon 64 3000+ (Socket 939) processor.

So, today we will be talking about two members of the Titan cooler family: Vanessa S-type and Vanessa L-type, and one really big cooling solution from Thermaltake : the Big Typhoon. In our article we will not only describe the coolers, discuss their design peculiarities and technical characteristics, but also test their CPU cooling efficiency and estimate the level of noise generated during the system operation.

Well, please meet our today’s testing participants now.