X-bit labs

Entry Level Liquid-Cooling System vs. Hi-End Air Cooler: Swiftech H2O-220 Compact Review (page 9)

Category: Coolers

by Sergey Lepilov

[ 03/24/2008 | 01:15 PM ]

Cooling Efficiency and Acoustic Performance

The cooling efficiency diagram has all results grouped according to the level of generated noise: in relatively quiet mode and at maximum fan rotation speeds. Here are the obtained results:

No doubt that Swiftech’s liquid-cooling system outperforms the air cooler in quiet mode by 8ºC and in full speed mode – by 6ºC. Taking into account that a very efficient Thermalright cooler is working in an enhanced mode today with a tall 38-mm fan, we can conclude that the Swiftech H₂O-220 Compact system proved simply remarkable. Its advantage obtained on a pretty hot quad-core processor deserves our greatest praise.  Moreover, I would like to remind you once again that although this liquid-cooling system is designed by a very well-known company, it is an entry-level solution.

I would like to add that further processor overclocking was limited by the overclocking potential of our particular CPU sample. Even with the fans on the Swiftech’s system rotating at their maximum speeds we couldn’t push the processor frequency beyond 4.05GHz, and further Vcore increase unfortunately resulted only in higher CPU temperature, but not higher frequency.

And what do the noise readings for Swiftech H₂O-220 Compact look like? The answer is given on the diagram below:

First of all - the pump. We measured the noise it generated with the radiator fans turned off and we can’t say it was loud or annoying. You can barely hear it against the ambient noise of our quiet system case (35.1dBA at 1m). Nevertheless, if you connect the radiator fans to 5V power source (850~900RPM), you will not be able to distinguish them against the background of a working pump. As you can see from the acoustic measurements, a pair of 120-mm fans rotating at 1200RPM generates only 0.4dBA higher sound pressure than the pump (when measured from a 1m distance). That is why it doesn’t really make sense to run the tests with fans connected to a 5V power source.

As for the tall 120mm fan of the Thermalright SI-128 cooler, it is a real beast at almost 3,000RPM that compares only to the reference Radeon HD 2900 XT cooler or even worse: Radeon X1900 XT cooler. Far not every user will dare have this cooler work in this mode, maybe just for a short period of time that is why these results are of pure theoretical value to us. However at 1,300RPM the cooler is much quieter and doesn’t produce any more noise than the two fans of Swiftech H₂O-220 Compact liquid-cooling system.