X-bit labs

Battle of the Titans: Super Coolers from Scythe, Thermaltake and Zalman Face to Face (page 22)

Category: Coolers

by Doors4ever

[ 10/21/2005 | 11:44 AM ]

The cooler can be used in passive mode, if you’ve got an exhaust fan on the rear panel of your system case, but the Sonic Tower kit also includes two brackets for putting an additional fan on. I decided to carry out the same two-fan experiment as with the Scythe Ninja, fastening the fans on the cooler’s top.

The Scythe Ninja doesn’t need a second fan, as you have seen above, but the Thermaltake Sonic Tower might make good use of it – its ribs are more densely placed and there’s big enough distance between the two towers of plates. As a result, the remote tower is not properly cooled by a single fan. In a system case the system fan on the rear panel will help the cooler, but for my tests I wanted to hang two fans on the cooler’s two sides.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t realize the idea. The cooler is so large than I had to move the memory modules into the two neighboring slots to make room for the fan. And I couldn’t put a fan on the other side of the cooler because of the rear panel connectors.

So I tested the cooler with one fan only. Like with the Scythe Ninja, I took the rather quiet fan from the Shogun (1600rpm). The Idle and Load temperatures of the CPU were 46-48°C and 64-65°C , respectively.