Thermal Performance

AMD Platform

To put the coolers under a heavier load, I overclocked the AMD Athlon64 3200+ processor from its default 2000MHz to 2755MHz frequency with a core voltage increase to 1.625V.

The latest available version of CPU-Z reports the core voltage wrongly – I had set it at 1.625V in the mainboard’s BIOS Setup.

The following results were obtained on the AMD platform:

The standard aluminum cooler you receive with your boxed AMD Athlon 64 processor isn’t very efficient. Moreover, its fan became as fast as ~4700rpm during the test, and so the noise from that cooler was unacceptably high for a home computer. Well, it’s good at least that the simple aluminum cooler just coped with a CPU overclocked to nearly 2.67GHz with a voltage increase.

The new product from Cooler Master does well in this test, being just a little worse than the leader Thermaltake Big Typhoon. The expensive and near-silent Scythe Mine is about 5°C behind under the S&M load. However, you should be aware that the noise produced by the Hyper 7 is audible against the background noise of a quiet system case, even though its tonality is not irritating as it is the case with some other CPU coolers.

It’s not surprising that the Cooler Master Hyper 7 is so close in performance to the recognized super-cooler Thermaltake Big Typhoon. The 120mm fan of the latter creates an air stream of 62CFM whereas the Hyper 7’s 92mm fan rotates at 2500rpm and creates an air stream of 71CFM. The product of Cooler Master is the noisier of the two.

So, I’m quite pleased with the performance of the Cooler Master Hyper 7 on the AMD platform, especially considering its not optimal position on the mainboard. Now let’s check it out with an Intel processor.