Testbed and Methods

There are universal (for several processor types) and specialized (either for Intel or for AMD CPUs) cooler models in this review. This made me use two test platforms.

The platforms were placed in a thermal chamber with a constant temperature of 30°C. The processors were heated up by the S&M utility at 100% load. The CPU temperature was controlled via SpeedFan; the RM Clock Utility was used to make sure there was no thermal throttling. The coolers were all tested at the maximum fan speed.

The Tuniq Tower 120 cooler was included for the comparison’s sake as a reference product (for more details about this cooler check out our review called Tuniq Tower 120 Cooler Review: All Super Coolers are Great, but Some Are Greater Than the Others). It has got its title of a super-cooler by coping with an Intel Pentium 4 521 overclocked to 4.13GHz at 1.375V voltage and with an AMD Athlon X2 64 3800+ overclocked to 2.8GHz at 1.45V voltage. Unfortunately, none of the coolers included in this review can do anything like that. So how will we compare them? This time I’m going to take frequency as the parameter to base our comparison upon. The higher the frequency the tested cooler allows overclocking a processor to, the better the cooler is. The frequency being the same, other factors should be considered, like temperature, noise, ease of installation, etc.

The technical characteristics of the coolers are taken from the manufacturers’ websites with differences specifically mentioned where necessary.

And I’m going to begin with the Spire coolers.