Technical Specifications

The table below contains the technical specifications of the Ultra Chill-TEC cooling solution:

Testbed and Methods

Since the manufacturer positions Ultra Chill-TEC  cooler as a highly efficient cooling solution with superior thermal performance, it will have a proper rival to compete with. I am sure that if you have been reading our cooling reviews regularly you already know who that is going to be. Yes, Enzotech Ultra-X cooler that boasts unprecedented efficiency among air-cooling systems these days. Besides the tests in quiet mode at 1350rpm fan rotation speeds this cooler was also tested at its maximum fan rotation speed of 2500rpm. Note the fan rotation speeds on the charts below are reported according to the monitoring data, and not according to the specs.

We will investigate the thermal performance of Ultra Chill-TEC cooler in a closed system case and in an open testbed. We had our platforms built according to the following configuration:

• Asustek P5B Deluxe/WiFi-AP mainboard (Intel P965 chipset, LGA775, BIOS 1101);
• Thermaltake Extreme Spirit II chipset cooler (4500rpm, 19dBA);
• Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 CPU (2133MHz, 1.325V, 4x266MHz FSB, 2048KB L2 cache, SL9S9 Malay Conroe B2);
• Arctic Silver 5 thermal grease;
• Sysconn GeForce 7600 GT 256MB graphics card (running at 670/1584MHz with a ‑90MHz delta) plus a Zalman VF900-Cu LED cooler at 1700rpm;
• 2 x 1024MB Corsair Dominator TWIN2X2048-9136C5D DDR2 SDRAM (SPD: 1142MHz, 5-5-5-18, 2.1V);
• Hitachi HDT725032VLA360 HDD (SATA-II, 320GB storage capacity, 7200rpm, 16MB cache, NCQ);
• ASUS ASCOT 6AR2-B Black&Silver ATX system case with 120mm system fans from Cooler Master (1200rpm, 21dBA) and 120-mm Sharkoon Luminous Blue LED side panel fan (1,000rpm);
• MGE Magnum 500 PSU (500W) + 80mm GlacialTech SilentBlade fan (~1700rpm, 19dBA)

All tests were performed in Windows XP Professional Edition Service Pack 2. We used SpeedFan 4.32 to monitor the temperature of the CPU by reading it from the CPU Sensor. The CPU was warmed up with Intel Thermal Analysis Tool (TAT) for 25 minutes (according to the method described in our article called Originality or Efficiency? Cooler Master Mars, Eclipse and Hyper TX Cooling Solutions Reviewed).

The mainboards’ automatic fan speed management in the BIOS was disabled for the time of the tests. The thermal throttling of the Intel Core 2 Duo processor was controlled with RightMark CPU Clock Utility version 2.25 (our processor began to skip clock cycles on reaching a temperature of 81.5°C+).

I performed at least two cycles of tests in each mode and waited for 25-30 minutes for the temperature to stabilize during the tests in closed system case. During the tests on an open testbed we took half the time for temperature stabilization. The maximum temperature in the two test cycles was considered as the final result (if the difference was not bigger than 1°C – otherwise the test was performed at least once again). Despite the stabilization period, the result of the second cycle was usually 0.5-1°C higher.

The ambient temperature during the test session was monitored with an electric thermometer that could monitor temperature changes over the period of up to 6 hours. The room temperature remained at 25.5°C during the tests (as stated on the charts).