X-bit labs

Roundup: Seven High-Performance Coolers for AMD and Intel Processors (page 5)

Category: Coolers

by Doors4ever

[ 04/26/2006 | 09:44 PM ]

Spire DiamondCool II

This cooler is meant exclusively for AMD processors, so I had no installation-related problems with it.

I should confess the specs are not very precise because they belong to the SP741B3 model (its characteristics are listed on the manufacturer’s website) while we’ve got a sample of the SP741B3-U model for our tests. The fan was rotating at about 2100rpm as reported by the mainboard’s monitoring tools instead of the expected 2400rpm. The noise, performance and other characteristics may be different, too.

There are now four heat pipes taking heat away from the cooler’s base.

A large fan tops the whole arrangement.

It’s the first time I see a cooler’s base that thick!

The manufacturer says it’s an advantage, but I’m not so enthusiastic about that. The purpose of the base is to make the heatsink robust, so it must have a certain thickness. Heat is to be transferred to the heatsink’s plates to be distributed in as large an area as possible, and this calls for a rather thick base, too. But in this case the heat from the processor is transferred to the plates not only directly from the base but also via as many as four heat pipes. In such a thick base there is a big difference between the temperatures of the bottom and top surfaces, and the pipes that have contact with the top surface do not work as efficiently as they could if they were placed closer to the processor core. Do not forget that the thickness of the processor’s heat-spreading plate adds up to the thickness of the cooler’s base!

How the base is finished is important, too, and the base of the Spire DiamondCool II lacks any polish at all.

As a result, the Spire DiamondCool II could only help overclock the AMD Athlon X2 64 3800+ processor to 2.6GHz, and the CPU temperature rose to an alarming 73°C.