by Sergey Lepilov
02/19/2008 | 03:23 PM
Contemporary Intel Core 2 Duo and even Intel Core 2 Quad processors do not dissipate that much heat when working in nominal mode. So, they actually do not require the default so-called “boxed” coolers that come bundled with the CPUs to be replaced with any alternative solutions. Moreover, even when Core processors get overclocked to pretty impressive frequencies (over 3.4~3.6GHz), you may do just fine without any super-coolers that are regularly tested in our lab. The only exception could probably be the CPUs based on older core steppings (for example, B3), which require highly efficient air coolers or liquid-cooling systems, which is even better.
Of course, if you intend to squeeze all the juices out of your processor with air-cooling only, you cannot really do without something like Thermalright Ultra-120 eXtreme, because CPUs from Core family react very good to Vcore increase, which, however, gets immediately reflected on their hear dissipation. However, far not everyone needs extreme overclocking like that. According to my experience and forum discussions, I can state that there are overclockers who speed up their CPUs not too much, but at the same time enough to require a better or quieter cooler than the boxed Intel one. This is when budget solutions like Cooler Master Hyper TX(2), Titan TTC-NK32TZ or the new GlacialTech cooling solutions come in handy. In other words, these are inexpensive, pretty efficient and relatively quiet coolers.
Nevertheless, we cannot assign two new cooling solutions from AeroCool Advanced Technologies (AAT) to this price segment. Starting with 2001, the company has been working very actively on designing and promoting their cooling solutions into the market. They have been offering budget cooling solutions for processors and graphics cards as well as top products, like AeroCool Dominator. Unfortunately, we were told that the latter had been discontinued, so today we will only tell you about the other two pretty expensive offerings from AeroCool – SilverWind and Xfire.
The first cooler we are going to talk about today has a very interesting name: SilverWind, although there is no silver used to build it. A small carton box bears the photograph of the cooler and lists its major technical specifications:
Besides the actual cooler, the box also contained the following accessories:
I have to say that this is very modest accessories bundle.
The cooler is made in Taiwan.
The design of the cooler catches your eye immediately at first glance:
The cooler heatsink is made of aluminum, only the base is pure copper. The heatsink consists of two parts:
The lower part is very similar to the “boxed” Intel CPU cooler, as it has the same ray-shaped plates. The difference is that it has a groove for the retention clip that should be used for Socket 754/939/940 and AM2 mainboards. There are two copper heatpipes 6mm in diameter that go through the copper base. They hold an array of 104 aluminum plates of the cooler upper part:
The cooler is relatively small. It is only 103mm high and measures 95mm in maximum diameter.
AeroCool SilverWind weighs 560g, so it feels real light, especially after the recently reviewed Scythe Ninja Copper.
The upper heatsink plates are very unusually shaped, looking either like the metal twisted by the wind or sea waves :):
92mm fan with transparent blades sits inside this top part of the heatsink array, right above the lower cooler heatsink. Its rotation speed may vary from ~1700RPM to ~2700RPM at 42.36~60.38CFM and 17.99~28.91dBA of generated noise.
The scheme below shows the airflow movement created by AeroCool SilverWind cooler:
In other words, the heatsink array sitting on the heatpipes in the upper part of the solution is cooled down with the incoming airflow generated by the fan, while the lower heatsink is cooled down with the outgoing airflow.
The cooler base surface gets a good B for finish quality:
The evenness of this surface is impeccable, which was checked with the thermal grease footprint on the glass.
There retention plate with standard plastic retention clips for LGA 775 mainboards is already preinstalled onto the cooler base:
So, the entire installation procedure onto mainboards supporting Intel processors (Socket 478 is not supported) is fairly simple: all you need to do is push these clips into the holes in the PCB around the processor Socket.
In order to install AeroCool SilverWind onto K8 platforms, you have to remove the preinstalled retention plate and insert the bundled retention clip into the groove on the lower heatsink. This clip will then catch on to the standard plastic bracket of the K8 mainboard to hold the cooler in place.
In both cases, you don’t need to remove the mainboard from the system case to complete the installation, which is very convenient.
The cooler is very compact and doesn’t get in the way of any components in the area around the processor socket:
The cooler glows white in the dark, so it will definitely make up for any overclocking mishaps you might ever have.
The recommended price of AeroCool SilverWind cooler is around $49, which is extremely high for an aluminum solution with only two copper heatpipes, no matter how sophisticated their shape is.
The second participant of our today’s test session is called Xfire (“crossfire”), which has been given to this product not for nothing, I should say. But let’s not get ahead of time, we’ll get there shortly. :)
The box is of about the same size as that of the SilverWind model, with very similar design and color scheme. It also bears a photograph of the cooler and a list of its major technical specifications:
The cooler sits in a transparent plastic casing inside the carton box. The accessories are stashed below.
The bundle includes the following items:
AeroCool Xfire cooler with EN10368 part number also comes with a fan rotation speed controller. The cooler is made in Taiwan.
The cooler design doesn’t boast anything innovative about it, but is still a little different from what we used to see before:
Two nickel-plated copper heatpipes, each 6mm in diameter, originate from the copper base. They cross one another (this is where the X in the cooler name comes from, I assume) and after that get parallel to the mainboard PCB surface.
Each heatpipe hold an array of 24 aluminum plates, each about 0.3mm thin:
The whole thing is topped with a black aluminum casing with a 120-mm fan attached to it:
I have to admit that there were two questions that kept bothering me every time I looked at the cooler: why are there only two heatpipes and not four, and why would they cross them with one another anyway?
There could have been four heatpipes coming out of the cooler base, each leading to its part of the heatsink array. In this case they wouldn’t have had to cross them… I wish I had a reasonable explanation for that decision.
The cooler measures 120x120x100mm. It is very interesting that the cooler weight is claimed to be 125g on the cooler box and on the company’s official web-site. However, this is obviously the weight of just the heatsink at best, because the fan alone weighs about 100g or more.
Since we mentioned the fan, I have to point out that the cooler we received is equipped with a 120mm fan with constant rotation speed of ~1500RPM:
At this speed our 7-blade fan creates 52.25CFM airflow and generated 23.53dBA of noise. The fan is decorated with four white LEDs in the corners:
AeroCool Xfire solution that comes with the fan rotation speed controller unit has variable rotation speed changing in the interval from ~800RPM to ~1500RPM.
The base surface is finished pretty well, although we discovered a few scratches on it, which may have emerged because there was no protective film of any kind on it:
The cooler installation onto both: LGA 775 as well as K8 mainboards, is extremely simple that is why you will not even need to consult the installation guide. The cooler is very compact when inside the case, I would even say it looks very neat:
I have to add that removing AeroCool Xfire from your LGA775 mainboard when it is installed into a system case is a very complicated procedure, because you will hardly be able to fit your fingers underneath the heatsink to turn the clip locks. Therefore, I strongly recommend removing the mainboard from the case before dismounting the cooler.
The white fan highlighting is very different from the traditional blue LEDs most other cooler makers use these days:
The recommended price-point for AeroCool Xfire cooler is $34. Here I would also like to add that Xfire looks very similar to the youngest Thermalright MST-9775 LE cooling solution.
Technical specifications of both coolers side by side as well as their retail price are summed up for your reference in the table below:
AeroCool cooling solutions and their two competitors were tested on an open testbed as well as in a closed system case with the following configuration:
The dual-core Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 processor with G0 core stepping overclocked to a pretty decent speed of 3600MHz when working with the weakest cooler of our today’s testing participants in its quiet mode. The processor Vcore was increased to 1.55V:
Monitoring utilities reported much lower voltage setting than what we set in the mainboard BIOS – it was around ~1.5375V. It dropped down to ~1.525V under heavy load (click to enlarge):
All tests were performed in Windows XP Professional Edition Service Pack 2. SpeedFan 4.34 Beta 38 was used to monitor the temperature of the CPU, reading it directly from the CPU core sensor:
Its readings matched those of the Core Temp 0.96 utility. The mainboard’s automatic fan speed management system was disabled for the time of the tests in the mainboard BIOS. The CPU thermal throttling was controlled with RightMark CPU Clock Utility version 2.30:
The CPU was heated up with OCCT (OverClock Checking Tool) version 1.1.1b in a 23-minute test with maximum CPU utilization, during which the system remained idle in the first and last 4 minutes.
I performed at least two cycles of tests and waited for approximately 20 minutes for the temperature inside the system case to stabilize during each test cycle. The stabilization period in an open testbed with the mainboard in horizontal and coolers in a vertical position took about half the time. The maximum temperature of the hottest CPU core of the two in the two test cycles was considered the final result (if the difference was no bigger than 1°C – otherwise the test was performed at least once again). Despite the stabilization period, the result of the second test cycle was usually 0.5-1°C higher.
The noise level of each cooler was measured according to our traditional method described in the previous articles with the help of an electronic noise meter – CENTER-321. We have reduced the subjectively comfortable noise level from the previously used 36dBA to 34.5dBA and is marked with a dotted line in the diagram. To illustrate what this noise level is like we can say that it is the noise generated by a high-quality single 120x25mm fan with ~1100~1150RPM rotation speed. The ambient noise from the system case without the CPU cooler didn’t exceed 33.4dBA when measured at 1m distance.
The ambient temperature was checked with an electronic thermometer that allows monitoring the temperature changes over the past 6 hours. During our test session room temperatures stabilized at around 25°C. It is used as a staring point on the diagrams. Note that the fan rotation speeds as shown in the diagrams are the average readings reported by SpeedFan, and not the official claimed fan specifications.
First of all we will compare AeroCool cooling solutions against a standard boxed cooler that comes bundled with Intel CPUs. This will allow us to estimate how much more efficient and quieter the new AeroCool solutions are compared with what Intel has to offer these days. At the same time we have also tested a popular and pretty efficient Cooler Master Hyper TX 2 bundled with a standard fan rotating at ~1880RPM. The recommended retail price for this cooler is around $22 and it is currently one of the leaders in the mainstream cooling solutions segment.
Let’s check out the results on the diagram below:
I have to admit that AeroCool solutions didn’t impress us with their cooling efficiency this time. Yes, they are indeed more efficient than Intel’s boxed cooler, although just a little bit. Yes, they ensure very successful CPU overclocking, but Intel’s boxed cooler can do that, too (although it is much louder in this case). It is remarkable, but the less expensive Xfire outperformed a more expensive SilverWind cooler, however, an even cheaper Cooler Master Hyper TX 2 outperformed both of them. Our best advice for AeroCool would be to revise their pricing policy, not only in terms of reducing the prices overall, but also in terms of changing the price ratio between different coolers.
The level of generated noise for our today’s testing participants was measured from 3cm, 1m and 3m distance. The results are given on the diagram below. The coolers are listed in the same order as on the diagram above:
As we have expected, the quietest cooler of all appeared AeroCool SilverWind when running at the minimal fan rotation speed. It demonstrated an indisputable advantage over the standard boxed cooler from Intel. AeroCool Xfire and Cooelr Master Hyper TX 2 demonstrated pretty equal level of noise. After that comes AeroCool SilverWind at its maximum fan rotation speed, and the loudest one is the boxed Intel cooler. To be fair I have to say that since this cooler supports PWM mode, the noise level gets significantly lower when the CPU is running under low workload and the fan rotation speed drops.
So, what can we say in conclusion to our today’s review? I regret to admit that both AeroCool solutions turned out not very efficient and far from inexpensive, as we might have expected in the beginning. With the recommended retail prices of $49 for SilverWind and $34 for Xfire, these coolers will have really hard time in the market. As we know, there are much more affordable solutions out there that offer excellent cooling efficiency and are very quiet during operation.
As for the indisputable advantages, of the AeroCool solutions, we have to certainly point out their universal design, compact dimensions and light weight, low level of generated noise, extremely simple installation procedure and original white highlighting of the fans. We believe that adding another pair of heatpipes to each of them could have made them more efficient, but at this time they only have four heatpipes for two of them. So, it is totally up to you to decide if any of the today’s review heroes should replace your boxed cooler.