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Cooling Efficiency Tests

CPU Tests

To increase the heat dissipation our 45 nm quad-core processor was overclocked to 3.75 GHz (+25.0%). The nominal processor Vcore was increased to ~1.5 V in the mainboard BIOS (+20.0%):

The cooler we used this time together with the best thermal compounds can cool the CPU overclocked to 3.85GHz (the workload created by Linpack). However, I lowered the CPU frequency on purpose, to ensure that the least efficient thermal compounds will be able to pass. And turned out, I was right to do it this way.

Here is the table with the detailed results and the diagram with the average temperature readings (thermal interfaces have been sorted according to their efficiency and temperature increase):


Click to enlarge

The results of our test session on a CPU show that there is a group of 8 highly efficient solutions starting from the leaders – IC Diamond 7 Carat and Coollaboratory Liquid Pro – and finishing with Noctua NT-H1. Arctic Cooling MX-2 and Gelid GC1 fell just a little bit behind them, and liquid Zalman ZM-STG1 loses another 0.5°C to them. However, the temperature difference between IC Diamond 7 Carat and even Zalman ZM-STG1 is 2.5°C at the most, so we can recommend any of these 11 thermal interfaces for use with CPU coolers.

And further on the efficiency differences are much more dramatic and reach up to 10°C. SilMORE thermal compound bundled with many cooling solutions is the worst of the 16 products tested today, so we would strongly advise you to replace it immediately. Silver-colored AiT Cool Silver and Romanian Pro-Thermal 81 also cannot boast much, and Arctic Alumina becomes the best among the worst. I would like to particularly dwell on Coollaboratory Liquid MetalPad: its unimpressive performance in our tests must be connected with not ideally even contact surfaces, so the micro-grooves didn’t get filled with the compound even despite relatively long testing period and high operational temperatures. However, the photos above as well as the results of our GPU tests prove this assumption very clearly.

 
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