X-bit labs

Introducing New Heat-Pipe Coolers: CoolJag Falcon 92-Al and Falcon 92-Cu Review (page 3)

Category: Coolers

by Sergey Lepilov

[ 07/17/2007 | 10:08 AM ]

Each CoolJag cooler comes with a 92x25mm fan with seven translucent blades:

A wire with a 4-pin connector goes from the fan to be plugged into your mainboard. This indicates support for a PWM-based fan speed management, but I found out that the fan speed of each cooler model was not controlled even if the mainboard supported the PWM feature correctly (I checked this out on two mainboards).

I don’t know why the manufacturer mentions PWM support in the specs, but the rotation speed is actually regulated by a thermal sensor located in a very inappropriate place:

Easy to see, the airflow from the fan will be always cooling this sensor and the rotation speed will never be increased. Regardless of the specific mainboard and the thermal conditions of the CPU, the fan is always rotating at 1400rpm although its speed should be varied from 1200 to 2500rpm, according to the specifications. By bending the thermal sensor down so that it touched the ribs, I managed to make the fan work within 1400-1700rpm depending on the CPU temperature.

Examining the cooler from top to bottom we’ve got down to its base:

The finish quality is high:

The polyethylene film protecting the base from accidental scratches had dropped off from both coolers during transportation, but I found no damage on their bottoms.

A small aluminum heatsink is installed in the bottom part of the cooler, right above the heat pipes:

It is not exactly a heatsink as its main purpose is to press the cooler’s fastening plates down. It has no contact with the heat pipes: you can see open spaces between the heatsink and the pipes and no thermal interface, either.

The pipes are soldered to the copper base.