Testbed and Methods

We tested the new cooling system from Arctic Cooling inside a closed system case. Our testbed was identical for all coolers throughout the test session and featured the following configuration:

• Mainboard: ASUS P6T Deluxe (Intel X58 Express), LGA 1366, BIOS 1606;
• Processor: Intel Core i7-920, 2.67GHz, 1.25V, 4 x 256KB L2, 8MB L3 (Bloomfield, C0);
• CPU cooler: Nexus FLC-3000 (900-2500 RPM, PWM);
• CPU thermal interface: Arctic Silver 5;
• Memory: DDR3 PC3-12800 3 x 2 GB OCZ Platinum Low-Voltage Triple Channel (Spec: 1600MHz / 7-7-7-24 / 1.65 V);
• Graphics card: HIS Radeon HD 4870 X2 2x1024 MB, 750/3600 MHz;

• System HDD: Western Digital VelociRaptor (SATA-II, 300 GB storage capacity, 10,000 RPM, 16 MB cache, NCQ) inside Scythe Quiet Drive 3.5” silencer and cooler chassis;
• Backup HDD: Western Digital Caviar Green WD10EADS (SATA-II, 1000 GB, 5400 RPM, 32 MB, NCQ);
• Optical drive: Samsung SH-S183L;
• System case: Antec Twelve Hundred (front panel: two Noiseblocker NB-Multiframe S-Series MF12-S1 fans at 820 RPM and Scythe Gentle Typhoon fan at 840 RPM; back panel: two Scythe SlipStream 120 fans at 840 RPM; top panel: standard 200 mm fan at 400 RPM at the top of the case);
• Control and monitoring panel: Zalman ZM-MFC2;
• Power supply: Zalman ZM1000-HP 1000 W (with a default 140 mm fan).

To increase the total system heat dissipation and make it the testing conditions a little harder for the participating cooling solutions we overclocked our quad-core processor to 3.9 GHz (+46.3%) and increased its Vcore to 1.3125 V (+9.4%) in the mainboard BIOS. The memory voltage was at 1.62 V and its frequency was 1487 MHz (7-7-7-14_1T timings).

The testing programs were installed under Windows Vista Ultimate Edition x86 SP1. We used DirectX libraries (from March 2009) and Catalyst 9.7 drivers. We used 10 runs of FireFly Forest test from the synthetic 3DMark 2006 suite in 1920x1200 resolution to warm up the graphics card. We enabled full-screen antialiasing 4x and anisotropic filtering 16x:

Besides, we additionally used FurMark version 1.7.0 that was launched for 15-minute stability test runs in full-screen mode in 1920x1200 resolution:

Since FurMark is sort of similar to Linpack in terms of the workload it created for the graphics cards, I decided not to subject the borrowed High-End graphics cards to any high risks during this test session that is why in this mode we only ran the tests at maximum fan rotation speed. We used RivaTuner v2.24 (created by A. Nikolaichuk aka Unwinder) to monitor the frequencies and temperatures of our card.

The tests were run at least twice for each tested cooling system. The temperature stabilization period between the two test cycles was about 10-12 minutes. The ambient temperature was checked next to the system case or open testbed with an electronic thermometer with 0.1°C precision that allows monitoring the temperature changes over the past 6 hours. During our test session room temperature was pretty high and stayed around 26.5-27°C, which made the testing conditions a little more serious.

The noise level of each cooler was measured after 1:00AM in a closed room about 20sq.m big using CENTER-321 electronic noise meter. Since we can’t use graphics cards outside the system case, we took the readings from a 10 cm distance:

This will allow to minimize the effect from the noises generated by other system case components. Moreover, we have also lowered the rotation speed of all five 120 mm case fans to 520 RPM and disconnected the backup HDD that was outside the Scythe HDD cooling and silencing unit. In this case the subjectively comfortable noise level was around 40 dBA (marked with red dotted line on the diagrams).

Since we didn’t have any alternative cooling solutions for Radeon HD 4870 X2, we are going to compare the performance of Accelero XTREME 4870X2 cooler against the reference cooler in several operational modes.