Cooling Efficiency

During Linpack tests inside a closed system case using the “weakest” cooling system of the today’s testing participants  we managed to overclock our 45 nm quad-core processor to 3.65 GHz (+21.7%). The nominal processor Vcore was increased to 1.475 V in the mainboard BIOS (+28.3%):

Let’s check out the results:

As you can see, Sunbeamtech Core-Contact Freezer yielded to its today’s competitor (enhanced with a custom fan) at minimal fan rotation speed and caught up with it and even outperformed it a little at maximum fan speed. The cooler is evidently sensitive to the fan performance, because at the maximum rotation speed the CPU temperature drops down significantly. Too bad it is pretty noisy, so it may not be too comfortable to be close to the system case in this mode.