X-bit labs

Cooler Master Aquagate Viva Liquid Cooling System Review (page 6)

Category: Coolers

by Sergey Lepilov

[ 02/02/2007 | 09:40 AM ]

Specifications

The specification of the Cooler Master Aquagate Viva is listed in the following table:

Testbed and Methods

The new liquid cooling system from Cooler Master will be compared with the original thermoelectric cooler from the Sparkle Clibre P880+ graphics card. It’s hard to find a hotter graphics card with such an efficient native cooler. For the CPU cooling test I took a Hyper TX cooler, made by Cooler Master, too (for details see our article called Originality or Efficiency? Cooler Master Mars, Eclipse and Hyper TX Cooling Solutions Reviewed). The choice of the opponent will become clear below when you’ll see the test results.

The Aquagate Viva was tested in a closed PC case with the following configuration:

• Mainboard: ASUS P5B Deluxe/WiFi-AP (Intel P965 chipset, LGA775, BIOS 0804)
• Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 (1866MHz, 266x4MHz FSB, 2x1024KB L2 cache)
• CPU cooling system: Thermaltake Big Typhoon + Noctua NF-S12 120mm fan (~1340 RPM, ~17dBA)
• Graphics card: Sparkle Calibre P880+ (NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX) 768MB, @621/2106 MHz
• Thermal interface: Cooler Master
• Memory: 2 x 1024MB Corsair CM2X1024-6400C4 PC6400 DDR2 SDRAM (SPD: 800MHz, 4-4-4-12)
• Disk subsystem: Hitachi HDT725032VLA360 (SATA-II, 320GB, 7200rpm)
• System case: ASUS ASCOT 6AR2-B Black&Silver + an intake 120mm system fan  Noctua NF-S12 (~800rpm, ~8dBA) + two 120mm system fans Sharkoon Luminous Blue LED (~1000rpm, ~21dBA)
• Power supply: MGE Magnum 500 (500W) + 80mm GlacialTech SilentBlade fan (~1700rpm, 19dBA)
• Windows XP Professional Edition SP2

S&M version 1.8.2b was used to monitor the temperature of the Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 CPU. The CPU was heated up by means of Intel Thermal Analysis Tool for 20 minutes (according to the methodology we described in earlier review). S&M would report a 1.5°C lower temperature than the Intel Thermal Analysis Tool did in Idle mode, but their readings were identical under load.

Considering that Intel Thermal Analysis Tool provides a CPU load untypical of most ordinary applications, I also simulated a Game test mode by running 3DMark06’s Firefly Forest test with 16x anisotropic filtering and without full-screen antialiasing 19 times. This helps heat up the graphics card and the CPU both together.

The temperature was read from the sensor integrated into the CPU and GPU. The mainboards’ automatic fan speed management was disabled for the time of the tests. The thermal throttling of the Intel Core 2 Duo processor was controlled with RightMark CPU Clock Utility version 2.2 (our processor would begin to skip clock cycles on reaching a temperature of 81.5°C).

I performed at least two cycles of tests in each mode (TAT and Game). I waited for 25-30 minutes for the temperature to stabilize during each test cycle. The maximum temperature in the two test cycles was considered as the final result (if the difference was not bigger than 1°C). Despite the time aalocated for temperature stabilization, the results of the second heat-up cycle were always about 0.5-1°C higher.

The ambient temperature was monitored by means of an electric thermometer that reported all the temperature chnages within the last 6 hours. During our test session the room temperature was pretty high and stayed at at 24.0-24.5°C.